Ben Taylor - apprenticeship case study 

Personally, I never felt like further education was the best path for me, my first year of college made me realise that standard education didn’t suit me, so I decided to try and find other options.

After I left college I worked for about a year and a half in a wide range of different jobs. I worked on a building site, in Game, at a restaurant, and finally I ran IT for a hotel, this period lasted for about 2 years. However, these, for me, were ways to fill my time and ensure I didn’t have a gap on my CV. I always knew that I wanted to build a career and I didn’t feel any of these were helping me to do that.

This is when I became interested in pursuing an apprenticeship, I heard about them through a friend I knew from college who was actually doing an apprenticeship at Invotra at the time, he suggested that it might be something I should look into.

I was initially interested because it seemed like a great way to progress my career and a good way to get into the software industry, which is highly competitive.

I picked up my current course after 2 years already working at Invotra, I had already finished a level 3 in software development so I already knew what to expect going in. The idea of being able to do a degree while continuing to progress in my career at Invotra was extremely appealing to me.

So far I feel that everything is going really well. I’m only 6 months in but I’ve already learnt a lot of skills which I can apply back to my job. The workload is pretty serious, so I need to get better at juggling my coursework with my day to day job.

The one thing I was surprised at was how applied the course content is. Everything we learn is in the context of how someone would immediately be able to apply it back to an actual workplace.

My main goal is to finish my degree. It’s going to be a tough task as the course is 4 years in duration, so I think that’s probably a good enough goal for now. Aside from that, I want to use things that I learn from the course to improve in my role as a manager at Invotra. The role is still very new to me so I have a lot to learn.