My name is Jonathan Jones and I am an IT apprentice at Rathbones. I am 18 years old from Wallasey on the Wirral and went to school at St Mary’s Catholic College where I studied for my GCSEs and then my A levels. Whilst doing my A levels I decided that I didn’t want to take the university route to follow the career I wanted and the main reason for this was because I know of people who went to university, put a lot of time and effort into their study, came out with a degree and couldn’t get the job that they wanted because they didn’t have the experience. This, along with the idea of being in debt after university made me decide to go down the apprenticeship route as it would be debt free. I would also be earning money whilst gaining experience and I feel that experience is becoming more and more valuable when getting a job; you hear on the news about companies creating more work experience schemes for the unemployed! So an apprenticeship seemed like the perfect route for me.
I had applied for a number of apprenticeships, not all of them in IT. Some of them were in the business section from project management to business and administration and other IT apprenticeships. While I was looking through business and administration apprenticeships advertised on the National Apprenticeship Service website, I found the apprenticeship at Rathbones and although it was under the category of a business and administration apprenticeship it was for the IT department, which grabbed my attention as I had had an interest in IT throughout school and had taken IT for GCSE and A level and had always thought it would be an interesting industry to get involved in as most organisations these days will have an IT department, so in an age when competition for jobs is high it seemed like a great industry to gain experience in.
The reply I received once I had applied was inviting me to an information day at the Port of Liverpool building to get an insight of what it is Rathbones do and to introduce us to the company. We were then told that we would be preparing for a presentation and an interview that would take place later on in the week and then we would hear about how we got on and if we got the apprenticeship the week after. For me personally this was horrible news as I really do not like speaking or presenting information to a group of people, and it made it worse that the group of people would have a say in whether you got a job at the company or not! I didn’t mind the interview as I kind of had an idea of what to expect after being at an interview elsewhere, but presenting was a nightmare for me. We had to imagine we had inherited £100,000 and tell the audience what we would spend it on and why, and what we would invest some of the money in. We had a day where we were taught how to structure a presentation and given tips on what to do and not to do, and another done for interview skills. This was done by Antony Stagg and I found it really useful as we hadn’t really been taught things like that in school and without those skills my presentation probably would have been all over the place! Thankfully those tips paid off and I got a phone call on the Monday after and got told I had a place on the apprenticeship!
