My Apprenticeship Blog:
Series 3

I’ve now been at West Mercia Energy for 6 months now … The time has gone very quickly, and I feel as though I’ve learnt so much since I started.

To date, most of my work has been within the customer service team and providing additional administration support to our finance department.

Over the past couple of weeks, I have begun training with our siteworks team, completing siteworks calls and improving my understanding of this area of the business.  

This is very different from all of the other jobs I have done. It uses different systems and is a very technical role, so there is lots of different terminology that I’m still trying to understand. I am working closely with WME’s siteworks co-ordinator, Louise, who is supporting my development and providing my training in this area.

I am currently doing a task which involves booking appointments in with customers to have their electricity meters replaced. This is because their half hourly meters have stopped automatically sending the reads straight to us. My job is to call the customers and ask them a few questions to do with the appointment and book everything in with them. Once the appointment is booked in, I have to update our system with the information and note the date of the appointment. I feel like this is a really good task for me, as it has built my confidence up with calling customers and using the phone in general.

For the time being, I be doing this all week except on Thursdays where I will still be working in finance. This training will help me when I’m working in customer services as I will have more understanding on how to answer customers questions relating to things like meter removals or faults.

My college days are still going well. I have recently had my appraisal which I have every 2 months with my new college teacher. The last assignment I did was on Business Principles; This was an interesting topic as I learnt about Stakeholders and who the Stakeholders are for West Mercia Energy – West Mercia Energy is a publicly owned organisation, jointly owned by four local authorities – They are our Stakeholders. This helped me think more about the businesses as a whole and not just the section of the business I work in. I am even ahead of target for my course, which is encouraging.

I recently watched a webinar about my end point assessment for my apprenticeship to help me understand it more. This was through Shropshire Council. It helped me think about what I need to be working towards daily, both in the office, but also with my assignments complete for college. Even though I have another year left until I complete my apprenticeship, it is good to be prepared. At college they have explained that my end point assessment will be made up of 3 separate parts, a knowledge test, an interview on my portfolio and a demonstration.

Since January I have been doing a day and a half in the finance department of WME. I really enjoy these days as it is very different from working in customer services. I now do the invoice receipts and chase debtors independently every week. This involves using a different system which at first, I struggled with, but now I know what to do I can complete these tasks quickly. I have also sent debtors letters, which was a first for me as I don’t think I have ever sent an actual letter before. Being 18, I have just always emailed or called people! I have also sat with our finance team to observe the weekly payment run and I have gone through cheques, logging them as required.  

Thank you for reading and look out for another blog post soon!