Civil Engineering Apprentice - Transportation Review

Im an apprentice Civil engineer in the highways team. On a day to day basis I typically work with AutoCAD, producing drawings for schemes looking at the road markings/ road signs. I also use excel to create spreadsheets to compare and arrange data in different ways. I love being able to see my work being used and produced into real life solutions.

The work side is great, the university however I find is very overwhelming. I understand that as im on day release we have a full day of lectures but it can be extremely tiring as we have 2 hour sessions from 9am to 6pm with an hour lunch break. I think if it was more broken up like we could do a few practical things in between instead of just listening as it can be hard to take in all this information when you have just been sitting down all day. They also sometimes forget at University that we work full time and they don't coordinate with the other lecturers very well e.g. we got 4 lots of coursework due all with the same deadline so it was an extremely stressful period of time where we had to balance all 4 course works and normal work and had no personal time.

The support from my employer was excellent and they ae always looking on how I can get the most out of my apprenticeship.

university can be overwhelming at times. I feel like they don't really connect with us on a personal level. We don't get any real feedback from any of the work we do just test scores and marks. The lecturers don't coordinate so we end up with a load of work all at once and can be very difficult to manage when you aren't at Uni full time.

I think the things we learn at University are a good overview of Civil engineering as a whole. When working in Civil engineering you generally go into a specific branch - for me this is highways. So nothing has had directly been to do with highways but there are definitely aspects that I take to work with me and is extremely helpful.

Yes

Jacobs feels like a community. They have a big cohort of new starters every year and I found it so easy to fit in. I also Love my work and they have a wide range of projects all over the world you can get involved with. I feel like the management is genuinely interested in my career and want me to get the most my apprenticeship.