The impact of COVID-19 on the everyday life of apprentices

In this blog, we would like to give you an insight into our everyday lives over the last few weeks and months. As a result of the coronavirus pandemic, schools and many shops have had to close. Our vocational school in Winterthur had to convert to alternative teaching forms. KELLER also had to introduce precautionary measures to protect employees.

The actual delivery of teaching was the thing that changed most for us apprentices, as we all had virtual lessons from home. Many different problems occurred depending on the year group.

For Caner in the first year of an apprenticeship, there were no significant problems as the cohort were already working on laptops during normal teaching. There were some teething problems at the beginning in particular when switching to distance learning, but he coped well with the subject matter.

For George in the second year of an apprenticeship, the problems mainly lay in the fact that he got on worse with subjects in which he needed quite a bit of support. In addition, the distance learning became more and more of a drag over time.

Dominik in the third year of an apprenticeship was mostly uncertain about whether the final examinations would go ahead or not. This particularly reduced his motivation to do any studying for school. The other two apprentices also found their motivation for school disappeared during distance learning.

We had home office once a week. We were able to complete various jobs. I, George, was able to write about acquiring discipline and produce a competitor analysis as well as explain the development of the sales department and depict the process for an activity using a flow diagram. There was also a group task: namely to create a quiz with 60 questions on KELLER Pressure. But for us in the company, the rest of the week was relatively normal without major changes.

Caner plays football in his free time and told us the following about his training:

«My football training was of course cancelled. All matches were cancelled just before the championship and training was prohibited. I have been playing football in a club since I was little without a break. This made it hard for me to get used to this situation as football is a huge part of my life. I was always happy to go to training to meet friends and of course, because I love playing football. This was not to be for a long time. A few weeks ago, we had training again for the first time, under strict precautionary measures. It was great to see friends, but the training was not so good. We made the best of it, but maintaining a 2 metre distance and only training in small groups is not ideal for football. Still, I don’t want to complain and I’m really delighted that it’s gradually kicking off again.»

Overall, we can say that we have learnt a lot about how to work more independently for example, or find out information ourselves. We were also all happy to have more free time, as we no longer had to commute to work. We are however not happy about the fact that the semester grades from last semester are being counted for this one. Caner and George are now looking forward to school resuming as normal soon. Dominik has finished his education at school, as his final marks have already been decided and he received the certificate on 1 July.