Our Apprentices and Why We Hire Them

Bristol and Bath Apprenticeship Awards winner banner - magenta and navy

Since we hired our first apprentice, Joe, back in 2016, Dial A Geek has been a real fan of having minions in the office. We often say that it’s because they make all the tea and generally help us to further our evil schemes.

But, in reality, from diagnosing technical issues to answering phones to onboarding our clients’ new staff, our apprentices play an absolutely vital role in the running of our company.

Which is why we’re so proud to announce that we’ve won another apprentice award – the BristolLive and BathLive Apprenticeship Award for an Employer of the Year 2020 (we’re going to put it in our trophy cabinet beside our last year’s Employer of the Year award).

Dial A Geek is all about creating a fun team environment where everyone can learn and progress. We’re chuffed to bits that our hard work in supporting our team’s development and providing sufficient snacks has been recognised.

What do our apprentices do?

The apprentices on the Dial A Geek team are the first line of the IT support we provide. Their duties might include setting up new machines for clients, hardware repairs, antivirus support, cloud services support, printer support or VPN configuration and troubleshooting.

Each of our current four apprentices is studying their own IT course. They spend most of their time with us getting some hands-on tech time and studying. Then they travel over to their course provider for a few days each month.

This gives them some actual experience of working in the industry, instruction from our more experienced team members, and lets them put their theoretical knowledge into practice.

For us, it means having some eager minds around. Not only to keep the company going, but also helpfully keeping our more experienced team members’ brains engaged by fielding their questions.

Outstanding Apprentice in Tech

A good example of what our apprentices mean to us is Yusra. Yusra began as one of our front-line tech support apprentices before progressing to managing our helpdesk and dispatching tickets.

Now she’s about to hand over those responsibilities in favour of full project management. Because, after two years with us, she has become an integral part of the team.

She helps develop processes, run the office, and has even represented the company at networking sessions and business shows such as the We Mean Biz sessions. There she managed to make several useful connections and leads on Dial A Geek’s behalf.

Her hard work, leadership abilities, talent and general practice of going above and beyond when helping not only the other apprentices but the company as a whole have made her a shoo-in for our nomination for the Outstanding Apprentice in Tech category this year.

Apprentice awards

In short, we’re hugely honoured to have won this award and very proud of Yusra who was a finalist in her category for the second year in a row!

We couldn’t do what we do without our apprentices. We’re immensely proud of their hard work and of creating an environment for them to be able to do it in happily.

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