Hitting the Ground Running

Recent leaver, Zachary Vella informs us of the in’s and out’s of balancing his civil service work with a Degree Apprenticeship. In his own words:

“What a crazy month it has been, I have gone from doing zero in summer for ten weeks or so, to one hundred and ten in the case of a few weeks. I started off with a week at Kent University which was actually really fun just as much as it was educational (probably less of the latter if I’m honest), but was a really good opportunity where I made friends with many of the other apprentices and was given an introduction to the pure rigour of an economics degree.

Since then, I have been getting in office for about 7:45 every day in which I have been graced with a subsidised costa every morning to wake me up and have been given many different tasks to do. Obviously I can’t go into detail for data sensitivity, but I am genuinely surprised that I’ve been given actual work to do, and work which is involved with planning for a possible no-deal Brexit. Tasks are all data analysis based, unsurprisingly, and involves researching data, collating it, identifying trends and then reasoning behind it – followed by putting it in a presentable manner to be sent to the important people.

I think I definitely underestimated how challenging it would be, especially seen as I thought I would just be doing admin type tasks for the start – a nice surprise to be thrown straight into it I guess. The big challenge is definitely trying to balance the degree in effectively just 1 or 2 days a week, but hopefully I’ll get better at that soon.

November 2019