Former student Annabella Ladley has definitely made the right choice for her after starting a prestigious computing apprenticeship.
This is what Annabella had to say:
"There's 11 apprentices in total on our programme with SSE (3 girls) and we have 6 month long rotations in different IT teams for the 4 years of the apprenticeship. I'm currently in a team that supports an essential application used to book meter readings and installs, I use VB.NET, Visio and SQL queries and databases so the things I learned in my computing alevel have come in quite useful. Some of my future rotations will be in governance, architecture and emerging technologies.The emerging tech team get to play with games consoles and VR all day so I'm definitely looking forward to that one. I have also been lucky enough to be the only apprentice that has shadowing sessions with the security threat investigation team because of my interest in security, these sessions are always the highlight of my week.
On Wednesdays I spend the day at uni (Chichester Uni- Bognor campus). The lectures are done in a classroom with only 20 students so there is plenty of opportunities to speak to the lecturers and I've gotten to know all the students really well.
Overall I'm really enjoying the apprenticeship and although its only been 3 months, my confidence has sky rocketed. I'd definitely recommend the scheme for current computing/IT students. You get a similar experience to a normal university course except the degree is free, you get 4 years industry experience and I'm currently earning over £1k a month after tax (its set to go up to £30k pa by the last year of the course)."
If you are interested in doing the same as Annabella then see the links below.
Link to apprenticeship info: http://sse.com/careers/apprentices/it-degree-apprenticeships/
Link to pre-register interest: http://www.ssejobs.co.uk/caw/en/job/509084/apprenticeship-programme-august-2017-intake-registration-of-interest