Data Science Apprentice Review

My role involves working on a variety of projects that relate to our company’s data and how we can extract the most insight to benefit our customers, colleagues and business as a whole. Day to day I am leading on developing new ways of visualising our data, managing stakeholders and project planning.

My apprenticeship has been challenging to a certain extent. As mentioned previously, my scheme was brand new and that was reflected in our communications we received from the employer and training providers. But a brilliant part of our structure has to be our support, when we join we are assigned individual “buddys” who are apprentices currently in Santander to guide us, we are also allocated an “apprentice manager” who stays with us the duration of our programme to monitor our performance and coach us on different workplace skills.

Our team-mates are the people we interact with everyday and from my experience they have all been very flexible and supportive with my programme, they always allow me to try new ideas and ask questions. Our assigned apprentice managers are there to oversee our performance both workplace and academic and I catch up every two weeks with mine to raise any concerns and review my performance. And Santander as a whole offers many different support systems such as people networks that host events on women in business, fitness with Jessica Ennis etc. and most recently a Graduate and Apprentice network was created to support us on our programmes so we can interact with like minded people!

My previous training provider that we completed our level 4 with, Multiverse offered an individual coach who was very instructive and supportive - we’d have 1:1s every month to review next steps and work towards the EPA (end point assessment).
Now we are with Nottingham Trent University the structure is more traditional and can be harder to obtain unique support - and once again as it’s a new programme, they haven’t specified our EPA in much detail.

They most definitely relate to each other! From day one we were learning about Big Data and database design which I now use in my current project with a tool called IBM IDA! And our most recent module is about information security…to understand cyber attacks and how to prevent them! Useful no matter what our future job may be!

Yes

For someone starting their career, Santander offers great ways of working to accommodate your development. And the support networks from buddys to apprentice networks really make a difference! They also offer great opportunities to develop internally such as leadership courses, international exchanges to work with a different country. And being able to move every 9 months to a new team really opens your eyes to how a business operates which can only be obtained through a programme like ours!