Part of our apprentice panel podcasts, Jamilah Simpson our apprentice panel host interviews member, Joel Roach.

Joel, 20, Is currently completing his chartered manager's degree apprenticeship at Microsoft.

Deciding that university wasn’t for him, Joel came across degree apprenticeships as a way of gaining the experience of the workplace but getting the degree at the same time.

Transcript

Jamilah Simpson

Hi, I'm Jamilah Simpson, the Multiverse community programmes and networks associate. I joined Multiverse early last year after completing my digital marketing qualification as an apprentice at Google. I'm also an apprentice panel member and your host for this podcast. Today we're joined by Joel. Joel, did you want to quickly intro yourself?

 

Joel Roach

Sure, hiya, I'm Joel. I'm doing a chartered managers degree apprenticeship at Microsoft's been doing it for a couple of years now and yeah like Jamilah I've been a member of the apprentice panel for about a year now.

 

Jamilah Simpson

Cool, so I think we joined around the same time on the panel. I joined around March, April last year.

 

Joel Roach

 Yeah, I think that sounds about right for me as well.

 

Jamilah Simpson

So your apprenticeship sounds really interesting. What made you decide to do a degree apprenticeship?

 

Joel Roach

Well before doing my apprenticeship I was at university so doing the apprenticeship was much more honestly as much more about leaving university than anything else. You know, I decided that uni wasn't for me. I wanted to get into work and sort of. Started getting on with, you know, gaining some skills and getting some experience. The degree of apprenticeship thing came about as sort of I was just exploring and seeing what was out there. Came across Microsoft's degree apprenticeship and it seemed like a great option to take that degree box whilst I was getting all my other experience.

 

Jamilah Simpson

Amazing and you briefly mentioned that you went to university for a year before. What made you change your mind and go down the apprenticeship route instead?

 

Joel Roach

Yeah so for me university wasn't like an amazing experience. You know it was an OK time. It was fun. Don't get me wrong. And I wanted to, you know, get a job afterwards and do real work, not study the subject for the rest of my life. So it didn't seem like I was getting much out of it, so I found it come across an apprenticeship and it just seemed like such a better option. Like by the time I sort of decided to do it, it just seems like such a no brainer really. You know, I wanted to be working. I wanted to be gaining real skills and applying the stuff I land in the real world. So yeah, it just seems like such an obvious decision to me by the time it got around to doing it.

 

Jamilah Simpson

Yeah, I'm the same. I didn't really want to like sit and listen to a lecturer for hours and hours on end. I kind of just wanted to get into working and even though I didn't really, I never had a job before my apprenticeship. I just knew that I wanted to get into the workplace, so it seems like we have similar like ways of thinking about why we choose an apprenticeship. Yeah, an Microsoft is a pretty big deal with global massive company. Did you always want to work at a company like Microsoft?

 

Joel Roach

So Microsoft came onto my radar because it was close to the town I was doing university and it was quite important to me that I sort of held onto those university friends and can sort of keep that life going without having to completely restart in the city, so that's sort of what brought onto my radar in the first place. In doing that, I was looking at graduate schemes and all sorts of things I could do after my degree, and then I came across the apprenticeship scheme and it was sort of like OK, why, why, wouldn't? Why wouldn't I start right now and then you know from that I start digging into Microsoft as a company a little bit more and exploring what those options were, and I was just