In early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic hit and had a profound impact on different societies around the globe. As the lockdown was introduced to curb the spread of the virus, it led to the closure of most educational institutions worldwide, forcing the delivery of various learning programmes online. This change in the delivery approach came with several challenges including student engagement, inter-personal networking, in-class participation and more importantly students’ overall satisfaction with their courses.

The purpose of this study is to address the existing gap in the literature and investigate the challenges faced by Graduate Apprenticeship engineering students and their associated teaching staff due to the change to online delivery of the program. To this end, a series of key underlying research questions were formulated and to address them a mixed method approach was employed. Two parallel phases of data collection were performed. Firstly, a quantitative approach was used in the form of student questionnaires from Level 1 and Level 2 year engineering students of the Graduate Apprenticeship (GA) programme, secondly, qualitative interviews were conducted from the GA staff to provide a complete vision of the problem. Thematic and statistical analysis on the data collected, was performed and themes were identified after multiple readings which addressed the research questions.

The findings reveal that despite the hasty transition to online learning due to the lockdown, most of the apprenticeship students were satisfied with the new method of teaching. On the other hand, teaching staff faced increased workloads as they adapted to the new teaching methods while maintaining a high quality of teaching material. The outcome of this research will help higher education institutions, lecturers, and pedagogical developers to identify learning and reflection points for future digitalisation initiatives for example universities could invest in technology so the students can experience an interactive lab session even from remote locations.

Keywords: COVID-19, graduate engineering apprenticeship, higher education, mental health, online learning, pandemic.