APEP Product Design & Development Degree Apprentice Review

I am training to be a NVH (noise, vibration & harshness) engineer in one of the full car sound testing facilities within JLR. Most of my time in this role is spent preparing and setting up the equipment such as microphones on and around the car for the tests and then running the test over a digital software. I spend monday to thursday onsite doing this and then every friday we had off to study for university.

While the structure of each department's apprentices will differ based the manager's preferences and the teams demands, from what i have experienced everything has been very well structured and organised. On our first week the 9 apprentices in my department were given a clear roadmap for different placement opportunities would be arranged throughout our four years; we also have informal fortnightly meetings to check in and talk about what projects we have been up to and formal check in and placement discussion meetings every 6 months.
In terms of the university side of my apprenticeship we have block weeks of lectures roughly every 6 weeks and for these block weeks the timings and rooms for each of these lectures is clearly communicated at least a week or two in advance and any lectures resources that will be used like powerpoints or questions are all available online most of the time before the block week, this allows you to clear see and understand what will be done in these lectures.

We have a large support system in place for the apprenticeship including: the JLR early careers team, who oversee all the apprentices; the university module tutors, course leader and our overall university apprentice tutor; our departments team and managers and in most cases we are assigned a mentor who works directly with us to teach us what to do.
As i have mentioned, from the work side of things we have informal fortnightly meetings to check in and talk about what projects we have been up to and formal check in and placement discussion meetings every 6 months and then on top of these as a overall check in on our progress from both the university and work sides we have formal 'Tripartite reviews' ; which we have every 3 months.

As i have mentioned as part of my overall support team, we have module tutors who teach us all the lectures through online and face to face block weeks and we also have a course leader and an apprenticeship tutor. If there are any questions regarding a module in particular are module tutors are normally available over teams (even when it isn't one of our block lecture weeks) and we have university tutors to go to if there are any other issues we face.

Personally i have not found that most of what i have been learning as part of my qualification has linked back to my job role but i can still see how the knowledge we learn links back to other roles and the company overall so even though i don't directly use the knowledge i learn in my role, i have had opportunities to use what i have learnt in my qualification to help me whilst i am on placements in different departments and i have also found that what i have learnt whilst on other placements helps me for my qualification projects and courseworks.

Yes

I have really enjoyed every moment so far at JLR and i have found that no matter where you go everyone is so friendly and welcoming. Even though it is such a big company spread over multiple different sites, the atmosphere is very inviting and calm which really has made the difference as someone straight out of school.