Our apprentices are now in their second term at university and are experiencing more of life at DNASTREAM. Here we catch up with Ben, Thomas and Zaeed to find out how things are going.
What sort of projects have our junior consultants been involved in?
All 3 of our apprentices are getting involved in day to day work as junior consultants.
Zaeed and Thomas have had the experience of on-site client meetings for a requirements gathering visit to a ports business. Here they helped in documenting high level requirements for an IFS Ultimo implementation project.
Our apprentices have also learnt how to use our in-house training material developing software and have started to create some client training materials.
Ben has been supporting change management of an IFS Applications 10 implementation project. He has been involved with content development tasks for communications across the customer’s organisation.
As Ben said “The opportunity to work so closely with clients after just 1 month at DNASTREAM is testament to the belief, trust, and excellent training they have invested into the apprenticeship scheme.”
How is the academic side going?
All have now completed their first 2 modules (Mathematics for Computing, and Introduction to Programming) and they all passed the exams and assignments with flying colours.
They have found content to be advanced and challenging but very engaging and should align with their work at DNASTREAM well. They have recently started new modules (Introduction to Business Management, and Information Systems and Databases).
Do you find that the teaching and the practical experience with DNASTREAM complement each other?
For the most part university life and their practical experience with DNASTREAM is complementary with a lot of the teaching linking directly into the work.
Thomas gave us an example, “One of our current modules is on Databases, this directly links on a lot of work I am doing within the project as its all to do with databases as well, so it is solidifying the learning at Uni by actively using it at work.”
Zaeed explained the benefit of working as part of the DNASTREAM team “We don’t feel that we’ve been thrown in at the deep end with expectations to know everything straight away. The people at DNASTREAM have made it very easy to settle in. We were given a lot of time to learn and develop our skills to then apply it to practical work.”
What have been the highlights?
The main highlights seem to be the opportunity to get truly stuck in to doing project work. All of the apprentices report that their biggest highlights of this journey so far would have to be the opportunity to be involved with visits to the client sites.
They really value the great experience of visiting a client, getting to know more about the company and how implementing the solution would affect them positively in a day-to-day business. This has helped our apprentices understand the true value of what we do and how it is benefiting clients.
And the challenges?
Getting into the swing of education as well as working seems to have been the biggest challenge for our apprentices, adapting to the idea of working and studying at the same time. However this now seems to be something that they are getting used to and enjoying.