When you join our 24-month Higher Apprenticeship Programme as an Outage Planner, you’ll have a mixture of formal training and managed office-based experience where you will be able to put into practice the new skills you’re developing and acquiring throughout the programme. This role is a dynamic and varied role, requiring advanced organisation skills, stakeholder management skills and a keen drive to take ownership and make intelligent decisions to support National Grid’s outputs.
At the start of the programme, you’ll learn how Operational Planning fits into the wider organisation, and you’ll receive a detailed insight into the processes, procedures, systems and working practices.
You’ll be assigned to a geographical area giving you the opportunity to develop the necessary skills by working alongside Outage Planners. Through this programme, you’ll gain the knowledge in order to undertake robust decision making, ensuring successful delivery of the portfolio of works.
You’ll spend your time equally between Aston University, studying for a Foundation Degree in Electrical Power Engineering, our National Training Academy in Eakring, Nottinghamshire, completing a variety of in-house, specialist training, and our office headquarters in Warwick.
Your academic studies will take up a significant proportion of your time. However, when you are in the office you will be given exposure to various departments and be encouraged to network extensively to really immerse yourself in the business. You will carry out various projects and assignments to help you develop your knowledge, build your skills, and provide value to the business.
You’ll also have the opportunity to spend some time on site with our engineers and fitters, so you can see for yourself the work that our Operations teams do in substations up and down the country. You will receive hands on experience and will develop practical skills which will support your academic studies and on-the-job learning.
Along with this you will perform a fundamental role that is responsible for the successful planning and delivery of a portfolio of work through the management of Electricity System Outages and be involved in strategic and year ahead planning.
Once qualified you will be able to:
- Optimise the outage plan, ensure prioritisation of business outcomes aligning to regulatory commitments and manage any potential delivery risks
- Lead on the customer interfaces with regards to outages and take accountability for the customer satisfaction score for outages
- Ensure all outage planning decisions are documented in the relevant systems and are communicated with reasoning to all relevant stakeholders
- Manage and reoptimize system access changes in operational timescales, having agreed those in cross-functional, System Operator and customer interface meetings