Supply Chain Business Process Partner Review

Extremely valuable experience - loads of technical and interpersonal skills learnt, loads of responsibility, interesting and challenging projects, skilful and talented people and support around, great leaders

I felt like I was an integral part of the team, and I was treated like a normal internal employee that was required to contribute to the team both professionally as well as developing the team due to one of my responsibilities in the team.

I was extremely lucky to come across a manager that was an incredible mentor and coach. He challenged me through my placements, let me go try, fail and learn important lessons and enabled me to gain valuable experience that will have a resemblance in my future career.

As I was progressing through my placement year, the daily tasks and responsibilities have grown and I didn't have free time at all. To some it might be a challenge but it presents a lot of opportunities to gain more insight into the challenges and issues in a corporate environment.

I wouldn't have believed before I started my placement year that I'd be given a chance to work on such amazing projects - projects that were extremely meaningful to the company. For instance, I worked on and supported a project that was supposed to save the company over 0.5 million pounds a year or I was assigned to a Project Manager role for one of the projects at my team. All in all, the responsibilities I have been given were incredible and enabled me to build a set of skills enormously valued in today's job market.

The skills I have gained enabled me to see a much bigger, cleared picture of IT in corporate environment as well as helped me with some of the modules such as Project Management or Business Intelligence. Overall, the placement year contributed towards my better performance in my 3rd year.

It's a very friendly, lively and supportive environment where everyone were approachable and always found time to give me any support or the knowledge I need. I enjoyed going to the work everyday and felt like it was a great place to work in.

The work was organised and set up well with an increasing learning curve throughout the whole time. The more I progressed, the more I gain trust from the team and management and that allowed me to take part in incredible challenges. However, there was a bit less structure at the beginning of the placement since I was the first placement student in the team so they had to find work for me at the beginning. Overall though, the placement was well structured and had a clear targets and measures I had to achieve at the end of each half-year.

The company offers a great number of training and development paths - some students were able to undertake Prince2, ITIL certificates or get a SAP training. The company also has a set of foundations (techniques used to improve your performance) and you are encouraged to focus on theses foundations and skills and develop them through various activities such as presentations, public speaking, leadership etc.

You are able to get a fast-tracked path to get onto the graduate scheme. You don't have to go through the application or video interview but you have a chance to talk to your manager and fill out a form where you give specific examples of situations when you showed skills the company is looking for. The next steps follow the same path as a normal application for a graduate scheme at GSK (that is online tests and assessment centre). However, the path is still relatively hard, you are not guaranteed a position and, therefore, it can be extremely difficult to get onto a scheme, even as an internal employee. As far as I've heard, there were 2 years when none of the internal placement students got in - that fact in itself shows the competition is fierce and not a lot of internal people get onto the scheme.

Incredible social scene - the IP unite organises weekly/monthly events for all placement students, some people used to go out regularly and the company encourages 'work hard, play hard' attitude.

Since the main headquarters are located in London, the costs of living and going out are really high.

There are a great opportunities/places to go out and socialise in London.

Yes - touch rugby, gym classes, football and many other internal societies at GSK.