Hannah, a chartered manager degree apprentice studying towards her degree at Aston University, gives an overview of her typical week
I’m Hannah and I joined Microsoft as a chartered manager degree apprentice in September 2017. I work there full-time while studying towards my degree at Aston University. Here’s a sneak peek into a typical week of my life as a degree apprentice.
Monday
The office is usually busy on a Monday, I settle down and check my emails from the Friday before and start my to-do list.
A typical Monday will consist of lots of meetings. At the moment, most of them are focused on re-branding a training website for our partners, which I have been given responsibility to lead. This involves talking to web designers to create the best user experience and working with subject matter experts to get the right event information transferred over.
My day finishes at 16:30pm so I have enough time to travel home and prepare for our uni webinars that take place from 7pm to 8pm. The webinars give me an opportunity to collaborate with other students on the programme and apply the set reading to real life examples.
Tuesday
On Tuesday mornings, I always take a look at my university work and plan for the next deadline. When deadlines are approaching, my manager and I have regular catch ups to make sure I am on top of everything.
After my meeting, I start working on the Inspire campaign, which is a Microsoft event for our partners. My role is to pull the registration data and compare it against our targets and send a weekly update to the event organisers.
I try to always make time once a week to catch up with the other apprentices at Microsoft usually for lunch or a coffee. There is a really supportive culture at Microsoft that stresses the importance of good relationships with your colleagues so I have made lots of new friends through my apprenticeship so far.
Wednesday
It’s now the middle of the week and on Wednesdays I usually work on the Microsoft Partner Community. This is a platform for our partners that we are currently updating, so this has taken up most of my time recently. I work closely on this project with another degree apprentice in my team and we have a regular meetings to discuss content and timelines. We also use this time to write new posts and track membership.
We typically have these meetings on the swings in the ‘Connection Room’. This is an area on campus where we can get creative and discuss all things customer/partner related. It’s a really fun place to catch up with colleagues and I love spending time here because it gives us the space to be creative.
Thursday
This is the last working day of my week so I spend my time checking I have nothing outstanding on my to-do list.
I have a weekly Skype meeting with colleagues about another big project I’m working on to monitor progress and implement calls to action for the week ahead. My manager has given me responsibility to be the topic specialist for any internal queries on this project. This goes to show that as a degree apprentice you are also given a lot of responsibility and respect within the company. There are endless opportunities available for both my career and personal development.
Friday
This is my university day where I get to completely focus on my studies. I still do a 9-5 day, but instead of focusing on my work projects, I am catching up with reading or working on upcoming assignments.
These assignments are designed to use the theory from the modules and put it into practice in relation to my job, this makes it much more engaging as each assignment is unique to your company and role.
See where a degree apprenticeship at Aston University could take you, visit aston.ac.uk/apprenticeships
