I recently wrote a blog post for Winchester University celebrating degree apprenticeships for National Apprenticeship Week. Although this was an easy task, the extent of honesty and detail I can provide in a blog like that is difficult to talk about, especially the hard parts of a degree apprenticeship. This platform is a little easier to talk about how I’m actually finding the course, the studying involved, and I can go into more detail in case you ever wanted to do a degree apprenticeship. I signed up initially because I didn’t know where I was going with my career – I’d always been told to ‘play the game’, and ‘a role will arrive when you least expect it’ and until now, comprehending that has been really challenging. I’d initially entered IBM thinking I wanted to be a technical software developer, but I didn’t do IT at GCSE or A Level, so I had very little understanding of what that actually entailed. Seven years into IBM and I’ve finally discovered that although I love understanding technology, I don’t really love creating the fine details of the code, which has led me down the route of business (which in broad terms, means understanding the mechanics of making the products, selling, and distributing them to clients and customers).
Signing up to the program took a lot of time and effort to weigh up the pros and cons, how I was going to fit it around my current life and whether it would work with my current job role. As a mature student, I wasn’t coming into a program ready-built for me to walk into, I had to climb uphill to make my everyday job work around the degree. I had to explain to my manager how the program worked, what the requirements were (from both myself and their perspectives) and what I needed their help with to succeed. In addition, I had to go down to four days a week to accommodate my day at university. Something I found challenging initially, was that all I had was some vague module names and little information about what those contained – the university website had more information, but I felt like I was walking in blind!
The structure of the course is very similar to a standard university degree: 8 modules a year, over 3 years with a large dissertation (or synoptic project) during the third year. We must complete assignments with the same deadlines as full-time students, with broadly the same requirements and teaching time, which as you can imagine can be daunting. Something that I wasn’t expecting, was to be in classes with full time students, it’s an interesting experience having always felt jealous of those going to university and a real fear of missing out. This experience as a degree apprentice has left me so far, feeling like I have grown up a lot faster having gone to work at 18, and although I didn’t have the ready-made university friend group, IBM did a pretty fantastic job at introducing me to a set of young and interesting apprentices right from my first day. One of which I’m currently doing the degree apprenticeship with.
In my first year, we were completing an assignment on marketing – we had a twelve-week module, with a one-hour lecture (completed in our own time before the university day) and a 2-hour seminar every week – this was a course with over 200 people. The content that we were taught was a combination of product and business-to-business marketing which at the end of the course, led to a 2,000-word submission on a company of our choice. As a degree apprentice, I had to choose my own employer, and this was demanding when IBM is such a vast business. I spent time talking to product managers, marketing executives and trawling through IBM’s website to understand at a basic level how their pricing structure worked, how they market to different customers and what brings value to each customer. I found this module especially difficult, because we were adapting models such as the 4 P’s (product, place, price, and promotion) to IBM’s portfolio (which looking holistically, is demanding). By the end of the module, I felt like I had grown a real understanding of IBM’s portfolio and especially IBM MQ for Cloud and this gave me greater depth in the IBM business and a real understanding of how the marketing for such a large company operates.
I spend most weekends in Starbucks on assignments and I’m fairly sure if you look at my bank statements it probably shows signs of an early caffeine addiction. The life of a student is not what I was expecting – reading textbooks and journal articles to try and understand the limitations of somebodies research. That’s it for this time but I’ll perhaps go into something else next time.
