Modern Apprenticeship in Management – Case Study

Ollie is one of our online Modern Apprenticeship in Management SCQF Level 7 candidates who has just completed his qualification, having contributed great quality of work and really engaging in the programme.

We wanted to share a bit more about Ollie’s experiences and find out what he would say to other people thinking about this qualification.

Ollie has been with Bakkavor Salads Bo’ness for almost 5 years, having joined their graduate programme after finishing his degree in Production Engineering and Management. Ollie has progressed through different roles, then in April 2017, he started working in a continuous improvement role before moving into his current role as Section Manager, working on the backshift, in February 2019.

In this role, Ollie has 3 managers who report to him and each manager has his own small team. Ollie’s job is very varied, working to liaise between different departments (the materials coming onto the site and the processing of components), managing his department and being a point of contact for all other departments. Most of Ollie’s time is spent on working with his people to ensure that production is optimised, everyone is happy and working to the best of their ability, standards are being maintained and the team is always ready for any audit that might arise.

Ollie had been looking for management training and a qualification to supplement his experience and training so far. He was pleased to be offered the chance to complete the Modern Apprenticeship in Management SCQF Level 7.

“The course encourages you to really reflect on what you are doing as a manager: what you say, how you behave and decisions that you make. I have been thinking about specific scenarios and asking how I dealt with the situation: Did I deal with it appropriately? Could I have dealt with it differently? Having to write down my thoughts really made me think about what I do in my job and the consequences of that.”

The programme covers a variety of modules and we wanted to know how Ollie found this: “Working through the modules and looking at the questions that I would need to answer, I found myself putting myself into new situations so that I could develop my experiences as a manager. This really helped me to learn more about myself and how to deal with different situations that were new to me. I was then able to reflect on what I had learnt and what I would do differently another time, helping to cement what I was learning on the course. I also found that with every scenario I came across in my role, for example, dealing with potential conflict, I would find myself checking what I was doing and how I was doing, questioning if it was the right thing to do or say and how I could learn from it.”

Ollie told us that he would 100% recommend this course to other managers: “The online content is important for helping you progress within leadership roles, encouraging you to be open minded about how you approach your role, giving you the tools to get better, to change your way of thinking and to avoid stagnating. It helps you to do a gap analysis on what you can do, what you need to be able to do and then you can fill the gaps. The activities help you to breakdown what you are learning and put it into practice.”

Finally, we wanted to know how the support had been from our team at Polaris Learning: “The trainer has been brilliant and getting back to me quickly if I am stuck which really let me push on at the speed that I wanted to move at”

We know that Ollie will do well in his current and future roles, and we are delighted that he benefited so much from this online learning experience.