Apprenticeships

Legacy Post This is a Legacy post from my old blog, this was originally uploaded January 26th 2022 × Dismiss this alert. I PASSED! So for everyone who does not know I recently passed my Cyber Security Apprenticeship. I have been doing this apprenticeship off the back of one I did previously for Infrastructure support. This apprenticeship has given me a wide range of skills and knowledge in the field of Cyber Security and has given me the relevant information I need to decide on the path in Cyber Security. Uncommon Beginnings As we all know COVID has been a big part of the world over the past couple of years, this has affected everyone and how we do things at a fundamental level. Before COVID, I had never worked from home before and just before I started my Cyber Security Apprenticeship we got told to start working from home. I was lucky as I already had the set-up to create my room into an office I already have multiple monitors I have my own PC and due to that, I had plenty of cables to plug in my work laptop into my monitors so luckily I managed to avoid the stress of setting up an ad hoc working from home office. About a month or so into starting working from home  I began with a new team which began the start of my Cyber Security apprenticeship.  now with COVID being an issue, the apprenticeship was a lot different to the ones I previously had. In my previous apprenticeships, I went to classroom-based learning where has now it was all remote. Training A big change in how the apprenticeship worked was that all the lessons and exams were remote.  We all know what chaos zoom meetings, teams meetings and zoom classes can hold and indeed our training has similar issues, Mics not on, Video not working, Text chat and such but all in all it worked well. The training was split into a week 4 days training and the 5th day being the exam. The Apprenticeship had 5 different modules with 5 different exams. These covered an introduction and looking at the building blocks of Cyber Security, looking at networking and digital communications, looking at security case development and also looking at the employment of cryptography within Cyber Security. This covered a wide range of different knowledge within the field going from things that cryptography to the admin side of things creating security cases, making recommendations and running risk assessments.  The 4-days of training were split up into three days of learning where the exam was split up into certain modules with the 4th day being revision. In the three days, we went through the content and then were encouraged to research it more and come back with additional questions and queries. This allowed us to look into parts of the topic in more depth and gain a better understanding of parts where we are weak on. Exams  On the 5th day, we had the exam. With this also being remote I thought this could be a challenge but it is probably the best way to do exams in my opinion. To begin you go through an orientation explaining how the exams work. Then you go through ID Checks which is self-explanatory, then (This is the unique part) you do a room sweep with your webcam. This is where the invigilator checks your room to ensure there is nothing you can use to cheat. During the exam, you will share the screen of your computer, Have your webcam on at all times and the microphone on. There was one issue on one of my exams. I was doing the exam and got to the end and I want to submit the exam and it wouldn’t submit Little did I know that my internet decided to disconnect at the point of submitting! Because of this, it disconnected me from the session and the exam. One of the rules of the exam is that if you disconnect at any point then you will not be able to reconnect and your exam is void. I disconnected at the worst time possible! luckily and managed to redo the exam in the afternoon and passed but I can understand the frustration that some people may have if they run into something like I did but I also understand the reasoning behind it as you wouldn’t let somebody just walk out of an exam hall and then come back in as they could be using devices to cheat. All in all, despite that hiccup it’s a good system. The End Point Assessment At the end of every tech apprenticeship, there is an assessment of your skills which comprise of an assessment in the form of a Synoptic project and an interview with an endpoint accessor. You go through the endpoint assessment when you have been on the program for the minimum required time. The apprenticeship provider will look over your collated evidence against the standard and if they find it sufficient they will submit it for the EPA Facilitator. At that point, you will be given a date for your synoptic project. And then a date for a few weeks after the synoptic for your interview. Synoptics are meant to challenge your skills and encompass the whole standard into one project. You usually have either one or two weeks to complete it. My Synoptic gave me a good challenge but I thought it was fair and I understood where my workplace skills came into play. When doing my project I had 1 week to do it. I read the brief and assigned each task to a different day. A good tip I have for the synoptic is to plan and be organised otherwise it can become overwhelming. Due to my planning, the last half of the last day was left for proofreading and collating everything. The Interview The Interview… For me the most nerve-wracking part