Industrial Placement Student Review

I enjoyed many aspects of the job. The role was varied throughout the year. The store time came with much structure and keen observation from management. The regional office time required much more self motivation and personal drive. I enjoyed seeing myself evolve throughout the year and become much more mature. This I found very rewarding.

Aldi is a company that pays its employees a lot, but it also asks a lot of its employees. Throughout my placement, I observed how Aldi is an extremely results driven. This means that sometimes Aldi struggle giving praise. Whenever Aldi achieve a great accomplishment, they will look at how they could have done better. Little time is spent celebrating achievements. This can create negative feelings as without strong perseverance, you can feel that you are never able to achieve what they expect of you.

Whilst Aldi has very structured chains of command/hierarchical systems, there are some occurrences where this fails. From personal experience, I found that my mentor at times did not have enough time for me throughout the year. Aldi have recently addressed this by creating a new role for Industrial Placements to report to. A massive positive of the placement though was that we were given director mentors to report to a few times throughout the year and it was fantastic to have this facetime with senior management.

I was very busy throughout the year. There was never a quiet moment. The variety in the work keep all of the Industrial Placement students interested but did have the negative impact of meaning that at times, there was a very poor work life balance. The industrial placement students banded together and made a very conscious effort to meet outside of work and spent time socializing. This was very much needed.

In terms of responsibility, we were given an incredible amount of responsibility from the start. Less than a few months into the placement, I was given the keys to an Aldi store and was required to open up in the morning, complete paperwork, orders and manage staff. This was incredibly exciting but also very scary. Overall, there are many areas for you to take responsibility for very big projects/areas and for you to make a real impact on the business.

The majority of the year was spent developing my personal skills and management skills. I felt that I did not apply my degree to my placement as much as others could have but the skills that I learnt will be very useful in later life and when back at university. A particular area that I developed that will be invaluable was my time management skills. At store level, you are required to manage you own time and the time of your staff.

At store level, the atmosphere was often very chaotic. This did vary between stores (some store busier than others) but overall the environment was busy. The staff working in stores were all fantastic which really made the placement amazing as fellow colleagues were very kind and inviting. At regional office, the atmosphere was very professional. It is very expected that you wear dark conservative suits, that you shake hands with everybody and that you are very professional.

The placement was advertised as a very structured placement scheme with specific areas for taking holiday and for training. I found that throughout the year, my placement would often change in response to aspects of the business. If there was a difficulty in one of the stores, we would be moved to this store to help support the store. It was nice to have the flexibility to change to company requirements but the lack of structure made it challenging to plan a life outside of work.

The company invested a lot of money into our training but the training experiences were very varied throughout the year. Some industrial placement students had fantastic training at there stores while others did not have such great training. This inconsistency in the training process meant that the Industrial Placement students were at different levels throughout the year. Aldi have made some changes to the future Industrial Placement programs but these changes were not in place when I was an Industrial Placement student.

The future seems very bright for a role with Aldi. The graduate scheme is very sought after as it pays very well and gives a very high level of training. All of the Industrial Placement students were very interested in returning to Aldi after university for the role. It was fantastic of Aldi to inform the industrial placement students at the end of the year whether they would like us to return to Aldi after university. The future prospects in the company are fairly limited as we spent the year training for the Area Manager role and this is pretty much the only career opportunity.

There was a very good social scene among the fellow Industrial Placement students but this was created by the Industrial Placement students and not by Aldi. We were able to band together and spent a lot of time together after work or on our days off. Aldi did help to promote the social scene by suggesting that we live together for the year as this did help us to stay in contact and keep a social scene going. Aldi did make it clear though that this was not what the Area Manager role would be like in the end.

The cost of living was fairly good as we were based in Swindon. We were advised to rent a house together for the year but we did end up being placed in stores not near Swindon. This meant that we ended up needing to stay in hotels away from the house. This felt like a waste as we had a property that we were renting but not actually living in for over half of the year. This has been feed back to Aldi and they have stated that they will be making changes for future years.

The nightlife in the area was not very good. The were not many nightclubs in Swindon and after working a long shift we would never have the energy to go on nights out. Also, as we were in hotels for much of the year, the role became lonely at times as you would often eat by yourself and be living by yourself. Overall, there was never much time for a nightlife when working at Aldi but we still were able to make some exceptions.

There were a few opportunities to get involved in activities outside of work. The majority of these activities were not organised by Aldi but they were with Aldi employees. We organised a football tournament with the some of the stores and had a small league that we played in. We also had a few nights out with some of our colleagues from within the company.