Alice Ryan, The White Rose Academies Trust Business Officer Apprentice, continues to write about experiences from working within the Trust; read Alice's fourth blog below:
One of the things that I love about my job is that I am open to lots of amazing opportunities that I probably would not experience elsewhere. What I mean by this is that all of the apprentices at The White Rose Academies Trust, including myself, get the opportunity to attend courses around business, marketing, finance etc. This allows us to gain invaluable experience, further knowledge and receive training to help us better our abilities.
Before the half term break, I attended an Agile Project Management Course in the centre of Leeds. This meant that I was out of office all week but attended a class from 9.00-17.00 which resulted in a foundation and practitioner exam at the end to gain a qualification. I found this very exciting! However, I was also very apprehensive due to the fact that I have no previous experience around Project Management so did not know what to expect.
On my first day, I arrived into the classroom to learn that I was definitely the youngest person taking the course, which only added to my nerves. The trainer of the course began the session by asking everyone to introduce themselves, say their job role and what previous experience they have. The majority of the people had up to 20 years’ experience in project management and were there to gain knowledge around the Agile Framework. I could have let this knock my confidence but I took this as a massive positive as I am gaining this knowledge so early on in my career compared to everyone else.
During Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday morning we were all loaded with lots of information about the whole Agile Framework. At the beginning, I struggled to understand everything but once I took time to revise out of class I began to understand it a lot clearer and could easily relate things towards projects I am involved in back at work. On the Wednesday afternoon after a bit of revision, we all sat the foundation paper which we amazingly all passed! A week later, I sat my practitioner exam and I PASSED!
I am really looking forward to other opportunities like this that will expand my knowledge and potentially help me decide on an area of work, which really suits my skills and interests.