Apprenticeships uncovered: starting out

• Title: CIMA Apprenticeships Videos: What was your apprenticeship like?
• Number of Speakers: 1
• Speaker Name: Alex Sanderson
• Speaker Designations: ACMA, CGMA
• Speaker Title: Group Equity and Reporting Manager, Experian
• Video Duration: 1 minute 29 seconds

[Background music: upbeat and welcoming electronic jingle. Purple welcome page divided into 4 unequally sized sections by white lines, with the question “What was your apprenticeship like?” in a large pane top left, and the CIMA logo in a small pane bottom right]

[The welcome page disappears and is replaced with the speaker, a young man with brown hair standing facing the camera. He is wearing a pale blue shirt with its collar open and is wearing headphones. He is standing in front of an off-white background. The upbeat electronic music continues to play in the background. The speaker starts talking and the music reduces in volume]

"My first couple of weeks on the apprenticeship programme and that experience, honestly were quite difficult."

[As the speaker begins to talk a purple title panel appears showing his name, ‘Alex Sanderson’, his designations, ‘ACMA, CGMA’, his position ‘Group Equity and Reporting Manager’ and the company he works for, ‘Experian’.]

"They were more from a kind of personal standpoint, it was quite a shock to the system to go from in a school kind of quite a protected environment to go into quite an intense working day, that was more my own personal experience. I did feel like as a company, though, they made a real effort at experience to kind of make us feel welcome. They gave us exposure to lots of individuals, we had kind of buddies to make sure we had people to kind of go to lunch with and people that we knew familiar places around. But it was quite daunting the first few weeks, but it was also exciting. It was kind of a tough balance between the two of that excitement of exploring a new area and new things that you're you're really interested in because at school, you cover a lot of subjects and this is a bit more of a specialism and something that you kind of feel a bit more passionate about. And that was exciting, but it was daunting because you were kind of in the back of your mind. You're kind of I guess you're asking yourself questions in the first week or two. Is this right? Is it right for me? Do I fit into people like me? Is this the right thing for me to do? Yeah, that's my, that was my experience the first few weeks that was kind of how I felt at the time."

 [The upbeat electronic background music grows louder as the speakers voice fades into the background. A black end slide appears displaying the CIMA logo in the centre of the screen. Shown below it in smaller lettering is Copyright 2021 Association of International Certified Professional Accountants. All rights reserved.]