Cisco UK Apprenticeship: What’s it like to be an Apprentice at Cisco?

2 min read

Jonathan Hesketh

I joined Cisco in August 2014, as one of sixteen Cross-Functional Apprentices for the FY15 year. In collaboration with our training provider, QA, we are enrolled on a 3 year apprenticeship program which sees us working in 10 different departments across Cisco.

The term ‘Cross-Functional’ in our official job title loosely translates to ‘jack of all trades, master of none’. I assure you; however, this is a good thing. We are here to learn, and what better way to do so than by gaining work experience in more departments in Cisco than any other employee will experience. Not only does this demonstrate to us how each and every department coincides with one another, but it also presents us with the opportunity to identify which areas of the business particularly interest us. With the right guidance, resources and perhaps some gentle persuasion, we hope to navigate our talents towards a potential job opportunity in one of these departments in the future.

So, what’s it like to be an apprentice at Cisco? Well, it’s really quite exciting actually. As well as the initial wow-factor of working for one of the world’s leading IT companies from such a young age, we also revel in the fact that we essentially start a new job every four weeks due to our role exposure rotations. This means that we get to connect with a variety of people working in different teams in different environments all the time. You wouldn’t believe how many Cisco acronyms we now know!

There are, however, some drawbacks of joining the company with little or no previous life and work experience. It can be difficult to adjust to a professional environment so quickly from school, where you had fewer responsibilities and no professional reputation to uphold. However, being thrown into the deep end like this has forced us to adapt and grow into (mostly) mature young adults. We have all greatly developed on our organisational, communication and time management skills from our time here thus far, which we will only build on as we develop throughout our respective careers in Cisco.

Perhaps the best thing – in my opinion at least – about being an apprentice at Cisco is the sense of belonging. With each and every role exposure is a new set of challenges that place you out of your comfort zone, whether it be from unfamiliar working environments to meeting senior members of the organisation (which, at our grade, is everyone from our perspective). One thing you can depend on is that your team and colleagues are there to help you every step of the way.

As part of the first year of our Apprenticeship, we are required to narrow down to 4 departments from the original 10, in which to choose to work in next year for extended role exposures of 3 months each. I liken this process to the selection of A-Level subjects from those I studied at GCSE-Level. It’s very similar to this, only this time you have to factor in the brilliant people you have worked with in the past. This makes the decision especially difficult, seeing as I haven’t had a role exposure to date which I didn’t enjoy. From this, I think it’s fair to say that it’s the people, not the job, which makes a company like Cisco great to work for.

For more information on the Cisco UK Apprenticeship Scheme, see Ellie Ulrich’s blog post here.

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