Being an apprentice means you will be in full time employment, but that doesn’t mean that your entire life has to revolve around your job.
Most apprentices, including yourself, are likely to be under the age of 24, so you’re still young! Some of your friends may have just started University or have been there for a while, so their social lives will probably be packed. It’s important that you remember to act your age too, there’s nothing wrong with socialising! You just need to remember that you’ll be really tired working around 8 hours a day and so might need more sleep than your student friends! I try to go out with my friends at least once a week, this is normally at the weekend and doesn’t have to involve alcohol!
A lot of the time, we will go shopping, go to the cinema together, or sometimes we just go to one of our houses and have a pizza or something. It’s nice to get out and not be thinking about work, you don’t want to fall into being a robot worker, you’re too young! – waking up - going to work - getting home - having dinner – going to bed – repeat - Change what you do each evening, or every other evening, do something, read a book ask a friend around for dinner, go to the gym or join a fitness class. Mixing up your evenings will make the week go quicker and give you things to look forward to!
If you think that time management is something that you need to improve on, set yourself personal targets! It will help you get your work done, apprenticeship work done and still have a social life. This is a really useful skill to have and many employers value people with good time management skills. Talk to friends and family how they manage their time, it might even be time for you to buy yourself a diary!
If you watch The Apprentice, you would have seen that Aleksandra left the process due to the fact that she couldn’t handle the work-life balance of being on the show. She felt that “whole work/life balance thing was off”. It just goes to show that if you aren’t happy with where you are it’s better to not do it.
Which is why it is important to spend as much time as you can with friends and family outside of work. And what can't you do on your apprenticeship wage?!
