Insurance Intern Review

Overall, I had a good experience during the 10 week internship and I believe that I developed personally and technically (through excel skills). However, I wouldn't say that I enjoyed it massively as I was put in a role that wasn't best suited to my skills nor was it a well structured/organised role as I had to find my own work and projects - something that did not happen until my 3rd week. As I am a Maths student, I applied to the Insurance scheme hoping to gain an insight into an Actuarial career. Unfortunately I was not able to find an opportunity to do this despite the fact that I could still apply onto the Actuarial Graduate Scheme through the Internship. I would go even further to say that my role did not give me any insight into the Insurance market. In a nutshell, Lloyds Banking Group is a great place to work and if I was in a role that I loved then I would rate it higher. However as the success of the internship is solely dependant on the team you are placed in, and since there was no solid structure to my internship, I have to rate it as average.

In my Internship there was not much of a 'team culture' and the office was half empty most of the time. During my first week I was not introduced to everyone, making it difficult for me to connect with my colleagues. The fact that I could sometimes leave the office early without anyone noticing made me feel under valued. Nevertheless, in terms of work I believe that I was trusted with projects to lead on my own and they gave the impression that they were extremely pleased with my work.

Despite the lack of presence of my line manager, she was hugely supportive of me and let me take ownership of my internship - even to the point of letting me do 2 weeks of work in the Risk division. The pros to this is that I could be more independent and only find work that I was interested in, however I would have liked to have some organisation as it often felt like I was not needed.

This varied throughout the internship. At the beginning, work was extremely quite and I took this time to complete online training and do some reading on the Insurance division - which wasn't always useful. For the rest of the internship, I would say that I had about 4/5 hours worth of work in a day rather than 7 (the whole working day) and I often found myself purposefully doing tasks slowly so that I would not be bored. I was thankful that there was a Responsible Business Challenge across all interns that ran alongside our day jobs -this took up some time through team meetings/planning etc, however I wouldn't say that I enjoyed being made to fundraise for a Charity that I did not choose.

Given my entry level and my lack of experience, I was given considerable amount of responsibility and received lots of feedback through frequent presentations of the progress on the projects.

Given the pure nature of a Maths degree, the skills/training that I gained during the internship will not support my degree. However, I have improved considerably on excel to a high level which will be extremely valuable for any future career.

As said previously, it was very quiet and could at times be quite lonely. People were relaxed and working at Lloyds is very flexible but it was often dull.

Very poorly. I was given the impression that our work was needed since our line managers had to 'bid' for us. However during my first few weeks, my line manager was ringing people up to give work/shadowing for me - surely this should have been done before my arrival. It just so happened that I was lucky to have one person agree to give me work which took up a considerable amount of my internship, I worry what would have happened if this was not the case. I believe there should have been some communication from a representative at Emerging Talent as to how we were getting on and having speaking to other interns, not all interns had the same experience. There should be some consistency across the internship.

Not many opportunites for training and devolopment - I often taught myself/researched online the knowlege I needed.However I enjoyed this so didn't mind too much.

I believe in the right placement, Lloyds Banking Group would be an excellent place to work. The flexible working/work from home benefits it offers are extremely appealing and you cannot put a price on that. Lloyds Banking Group is somewhere that I would like to end up in my career but not necessarily begin as a graduate.

Yes - we were all placed in the same accommodation and living in Leeds meant there were many opportunities to do social activities. I wished that rather travelling to London for an internship induction, we could have had a regional induction, making it easier to meet interns in the same location.

Since LBG covered accommodation costs, the cost was pretty low and socialising was fairly cheap.

Excellent, there was loads of great bars and clubs.

No, my team rarely socialised outside of work.