GBS UKI People Operations Review

My placement was enjoyable to a great extent. It gave me the opportunity to interact, work with and observe a great number of brilliant people, both at my career stage and more experienced than me. Even though I ended up on a position with a slightly higher administrative element than I would have ideally wanted, it gave me a great exposure to the business and the industry.

As an intern in IBM, you are surely given a real position and a pool of tasks which the business is reliant on you to complete and manage. You will be responsible for managing a processes or a part of processes yourself. Therefore, I felt that I and my contribution were valued by the people around me. I felt that appreciation is largely part of IBM's culture

IBM ensures that you have a Task manager as well as People manager responsible for you personal development. Apart from them, there are a number of people available to you should you need further support. Therefore, you feel that there are people who you can rely on to assist you both with your daily job and with your personal and professional development at all times. You only need to keep in mind that this is highly dependent on your own initiative. IBM is a DIY company, and even though all support and resources are available to you, you need to reach out and initiate the process yourself.

The majority of the time my workload was high enough to keep me occupied. However as with most other positions, I have had times when I wasn't busy at all, which I found very useful when I wanted to focus on personal development and training.

Despite my position having a large admin element, I was given a lot of responsibility at all times. Entire processes/tasks were delegated to me to manage on my own at different times and there was room for decision making. I would have appreciated to be involved with some business decisions and front office work.

I developed great communication, time management and team working skills during my placement. Additionally, as I had to interact with people from all backgrounds and career paths which boosted my communication skills largely.

Despite IBM offices being a relatively serious work environment, everybody is very relaxed and friendly. All interactions are based on a lot of mutual respect and are is still a lot of room to be yourself. It is always an open layout so you feel you can walk up to anyone and speak to them should you want to.

The placement scheme in generally has a good structure divided in quarters where different development objectives are set and training and support is provided at all stages.

The placement community receives access to an incredibly large number of free online training available at all times to everyone. There are some short training and educational sessions organized throughout the year. However, I felt that more live/class-room and hand-on training could have been provided to interns.

It is a huge company operating in most countries you could thing of. There are so many different areas of business in IBM that you could move into completely different career paths and countries and still be in the same company. I think it is amazing how many opportunities and exposure you have in one company.

We have large interns and graduates communities and everybody socialises with everybody which is great. There are lots of networking and social events you can attend and meet other people in the company. There are numerous databases and platforms made entirely to ease the communication and the networking of employees within the company.

I was personally based in London which is a fairly expensive city to live in. I am normally based in London so it wasn't any shock to me, but I recognise being here makes everything way more expensive. However, IBM has offices and client locations all over the country and you can end up being based pretty much anywhere. In certain cases, you can end up having a lot of your costs covered by the company, when you spend time on client locations, so you can end up anywhere in the specter between "extortionately high cost of living" and "barely paying anything to be here"

1 word - London.

Again - London. You can do and get involved in pretty much anything you can ever thing of. And if it isn't already happening somewhere in the city you have plenty of room and platforms to start it.