At the Local Government Apprentice of the Year event, there are a few of different awards on offer to apprentices. These include Apprentice of the Year and the social media winner. However, the judges are not just looking at each apprentice individually but are also assessing how well individuals are working together in order to award their ‘best overall team’.
The Local Government Apprentice of the Year event provides opportunities for teams of around eight or nine apprentices to work together on a series of challenges. The teams are mixed so that participants work with new colleagues from other regions and across of variety of different apprenticeship standards, from business administrator to youth worker and from software development to HGV apprentices.
Throughout the day, each team is observed by development leads who assess how apprentices interact and collaborate with their group. As such, the importance of teamwork does not go unnoticed and so in, addition to the ‘Apprentice of the Year’, a ‘Winning Team’ is also selected, with each team member receiving a prize. However, the apprentices don’t make this decision easy for the Development Leads, as shown at this year’s event when the standard was so high that two ‘winning teams’ were chosen!
I think the best part of the event was the people. Everyone you talked with from apprentices, event runners, development leads, etc, all had nothing but good things to say and made me feel comfortable from start. to finish
Jordan Smith, Signage Technician apprentice, Bolton Council
Part of one of this year’s winning teams was Jordan Smith, a level 3 Signage Technician apprentice from Bolton Council. Jordan decided to take part in the event as he felt it was a good opportunity to learn new things, get to know other apprentices and learn things about himself, including how he might handle working in a team of people he didn’t know.
When reflecting, Jordan recalls how the event certainly delivered on his hopes. According to Jordan, despite being a little sceptical about this year’s theme which was health and wellbeing, the encouragement from his teammates enabled him to learn things about himself as they supported him in being able to actively contribute his ideas and suggestions. He said,
I am really grateful for my team as they involved everyone. Some people in our team were confident right from the start and were firing ideas out left and right, however, they were also great at pulling conversations out of people like me so that I didn’t fade out of the conversation as I didn’t know much about the main theme. When the day came to an end I had mixed feelings - I wouldn’t have minded if it had gone on for another 8 hours because of the people I got to share my time with.
According to Jordan, the opportunity to be part of a team that would normally never work together due to them all being from different councils, was definitely the most rewarding part of the event. Jordan also reflects on how fulfilling it then was to see the ideas that his team had generated come together at the end of the event. He said,
it was fun to see what started as just an idea start to take shape and by the end become something everyone in our team felt we were a part of.
I am really happy I got to be a part of the event