Apprentice Development Coach
BT Openreach

Victoria B

0:00:04 Hi, I’m Victoria B. I’m an apprentice development coach for BT Operate, and I’m from Wolverhampton. As an apprentice development coach, I look after around twelve apprentices in the Midlands area. That will involve making sure that they have gone on their training. I look after all their needs within their apprenticeship, and, personally, for my day to day role, I will be office-based. I don’t usually get out and about but I can obviously go and meet my apprentices as and when for one to ones and twelve weekly reviews.

00:00:40 As a young kid, I probably loved to go into something like interior design, but I think probably hooking into it, it was probably a bit farfetched, but maybe one day I’ll go into that sort of thing. At school I did quite well in most subjects. I think the one I shone most again in is probably art. I really did enjoy doing art, and doing painting and designing, but also I did really quite crave looking at new technologies and I quite like doing science. I did really well in my GCSEs at school. I had no problems there. My next sort of steps was to probably go to college. I signed up for the local college and I also was then made aware that there was a BT apprenticeship scheme, so I applied for both. There was no harm in doing that.

00:01:28 I got through to the interview stage at BT and I thought, well, I’ll definitely go for that and see how far and how well I do, but I’d also still got in the back of my mind, well, should I go to college? So I made a decision to actually go for the BT job in the end and I thought that would give me the best of both worlds. I’d be able to earn money, as well as still continuing with education, which is what I would have done at college.

00:01:56 My dad actually worked for BT himself, which is how I really found out about the apprenticeship scheme, but I think he didn’t influence me to go down that route if I didn’t want to; it was really that he was only the opening to show me that possibility was there. If I’m totally honest, when I did choose to leave school, I think my parents… I think they were really excited for me, but I think they would probably prefer that I had stopped in education. Now they would totally disagree with that choice and decision. They totally support me in what I’m doing. They think I’m doing extremely well. As I say, I’m still continuing my education, so in their eyes that’s fantastic and I’m shining within my job role so that has gone really well, too.

00:02:47 As part of BT, I managed to go on a trip to Africa, which was absolutely fantastic. We raised well over fifty thousand pounds, which in dollars goes a long way in Tanzania. There was a group of us that went out there – around forty apprentices, plus ten coaches, and we went out there to build schools for the local Masai community. That felt very rewarding. This was something that was going to affect the community for years and years to come. This was something that was not going to go away overnight. It was definitely a direct investment of money that we’d raised personally.

00:03:22 We went on Safari whilst we were there. Seeing Tanzania at my age was absolutely incredible to see the local community, to see the wildlife. It was absolutely stunning.

00:03:34 In the next five to ten years, or twenty years, I’d probably like to see myself in management. As any young person, I’d like to do well. I’d like to have lots of money to spend. I will have finished my degree in the future, so possibly that will open up opportunities to me and maybe start something like my art on the side, outside of work or something.