1st Year Apprentice Award 2019 - Matthew Harris
09:36The winner of our 1st year apprentice award went to... Matthew Harris!!
We asked Matthew a few questions about his Apprenticeship and winning this award...
1) What is your Apprenticeship?
My apprenticeship is in Business Administration
and my role at the university is Administrative Assistant in Personnel
Services. I work, primarily, with the Adverts team and Reward Team as well as
the HR Policy Team.
Because of the nature of my role I am often in contact with lots of departments across the university, from Chemistry to Clinical
Neurosciences... Each department is frequently looking to hire new people to
fill new roles and so it is my job to help make sure these roles are advertised
on our website and with over 13,600 staff working for the university currently,
you can appreciate that there's always plenty to do!
My daily responsibilities include emailing new job adverts
to external job sites for them to advertise, managing the adverts team inbox,
answering a wide variety of queries from HR staff across the university,
grading new jobs or completing regradings on behalf of the reward team, Adding
job adverts to our site using a web content management system and completing
research on market pay to collate data on median pay for various job roles
across the UK as well as a few other bits and bobs such as comparing financial
information from other universities with Oxford University and helping the HR
policy team with surveys and indexing old papers etc. I also order stationary
for the office and manage the petty cash tin.
2) Can you describe some benefits of undertaking
Apprenticeship based training?
I was actually studying as an undergraduate in
my 2nd year at another university myself when I decided it wasn't
for me and I wanted to do something else instead and in my opinion the work
experience and knowledge I have gained from my apprenticeship has been far more
valuable than what I was doing before and will look really good on a CV too,
not to mention I'm now getting paid instead of getting in debt!
I look forward to coming to work each day and I feel
as though I'm valued by my colleagues and managers. I would highly recommend
doing an apprenticeship to anyone considering it.
3) What was your reaction to winning your award?
I was so happy and a little surprised when my
name was called out but I was absolutely delighted, although, it was a little
nerve-racking being the first one called! I was very grateful that I had been
chosen; I always try my absolute hardest at work and have always been
enthusiastic about taking on new responsibilities and giving it 100% but I was
also certain that my work ethic would have been shared with many other
apprentices too and so I had no idea I would win.
4) What would you recommend to anyone else
considering an Apprenticeship/taking on an apprentice?
Go for it!
Sometimes it’s easy to feel pressured into heading off to university,
especially if lots of your friends are going but doing an apprenticeship can be
just as a valuable!
There
are so many departments and thus a really wide range of apprenticeships on
offer, from Junior Electrical Engineer to HR administrator. You will be given
an actual role within your team - you won't just be an added on extra, also, working at Oxford University will look really good on your
CV because it is such a worldwide renowned institution for education and
research.
The training and
experience you receive will definitely but you in good standing for a full time
position and its worth mentioning that Oxford University pays their apprentices
exceptionally well.
From a management
perspective, getting an apprentice to fill a role instead of hiring someone who
is not an apprentice would bring down costs for the department but may well
yield the same level of productivity.
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