Corona crisis: Apprenticeship@Home – Trainees share their experiences

Everything new and unfamiliar

The corona pandemic cannot be compared with any situation we know of. Therefore, there was no ready-made plan for this case. Nobody was really sure what to do.

At this point we have to say that TÜV Rheinland really acted quickly and efficiently. It started with the introduction of home office for the trainees, which was new for us. The changeover to this model was not only extremely fast, but also smooth. Within a few days, the entire business was controlled from home.

Trainees working from home

With the introduction of home office, there were now also regular appointments for video calls with our training management. This enabled us to ensure that all trainees had access to the information. As far as the next measures were concerned, we were always up to date and felt well looked after.

Working from home also went very well. We were given more responsibility. And we believe that working more independently has also had a positive effect on our personal development. The workload was dependent on the department the trainee was working in. But even where it didn’t work quite as well, attempts were made to find a quick solution. Internally, from the employer’s side, it worked quite well to continue the apprenticeship as usual.

Vocational school during Corona

But what did it look like in vocational school? Unfortunately, we can’t give quite as good feedback here. After it was clear that the schools now had to be closed, nothing really worked. Information was passed on to us students very slowly. While other schools quickly switched to online teaching, nothing happened at our school. Our “lessons” consisted of e-mails with tasks one week and solutions the following week. In our opinion this had no real learning-effect and also left gaps in our learning content.

We can nevertheless mention one good thing: We have been given access to Office365 and now use this access regularly.

Back to Business

In conclusion, it can be said that our company was better prepared compared to our vocational school and we felt well looked after. We were also able to solve some of the communication problems at school with our trainer Stefanie Groß.

We are glad that the situation has eased a bit and hope that other trainees felt well prepared and that we were able to give new ideas for improvements with our blog post.

Leona works in her office almost every day again and consults with her colleagues on a weekly basis, as not everyone is allowed to be in the room without a mask at the same time. She could still work from home, but finds it nicer to be in the office, where she can work with two monitors and have contacts on site.

Luka comes to the office once a week and works from home on the other days. The arrangement is relatively simple, since the team has already agreed on a fixed weekly schedule. Luka likes to work from home. On one hand, it saves him time and money and on the other hand it allows him to structure his day more easily.