IBM Watson Customer Engagment: WorldWide Channel Enablement Support Review

My job was interesting for the first few months while I was learning all my responsibilities. However, once I settled in it became fairly boring as I was doing similar things every day and never really had to use very much brain power. I was also in a very small office with a total of 5 interns and no grads in the office (maximum) which meant that there wasn't great on a social aspect.

I was based in a small office and was in the Worldwide team and many of the people that I worked with I had never met (as they lived in America) which was a bit frustrating. However, they were very nice and often gave me positive feedback and made me feel a valued member of the team. One person in particular often stuck his neck out for me and would always be looking for ways for me to get more involved.

At IBM you have an Early Professionals Manager (EPM) and a task manager. Your task manager is the person that works with you on a daily basis and your EPM is there is you have any issues with the placement as a whole. My task manager was very nice and supportive, she gave me lots of feedback, both positive and constructive and she was flexible about how I worked, I was able to work at home on Fridays and in the Southbank office on Mondays from roughly halfway into my placement. The main criticism I would give is that my manager was rarely in the office which meant that most of our communication was either by email, the phone or the IBM messaging system.

My workload fluctuated a lot. At the beginning I was fairly busy and there were several other times during the year when I was also busy. However, there were also many time during my placement where I really didn't have a lot to do and this could sometimes last for several weeks at a time.

I had an ok amount of responsibility. My main responsibilities involved setting up, communicating and running webcasts (online training sessions) for Business Partners and managing the IBM Business Partner communities (solution specific hubs that contained valuable resources for Business Partners). I also carried out some ad hoc work for various IBMers during my year.

I think that my confidence and communication skills have improved. I don't think anything that I did during my placement year would really help much with my degree as it wasn't academically rigorous at all. However, I think that I will now go into graduate scheme interviews and assessment centres more confident than in the past.

The office was very quit and there were days when there were less than ten people in it. The people in the office where nice, and is was easy enough to get work done there, however it could be very boring at times and the social aspect of working was severely lacking.

My experience was fairly good on this front. I had a task manager and another manager that I could talk to if I had any problems. There was also a careers day and we had several reviews and chances to seek help during our placements. However, one of my college's managers got made redundant half way through their placement and I think that IBM handled this very badly and gave them very little support.

The company has several hours of educational videos that they encourage you to watch and they also payed for me to travel to an IBM client site in Swindon for 3 days to get some shadowing in consultancy. There was also a careers day which was compulsory for all interns to attend.

The employment prospects are not good. As the company is performing badly they are making lots of people redundant and are hiring very few graduates. We have been told to not set our sights on IBM as they have no idea how many people they will be hiring and we are by no means guaranteed a place.

As mentioned previously there were very few people in our office and there were very few social events that we heard of with the exception of a Christmas dinner and one or two placement events. IBM also didn't pay for any of these event which I thought was a little mean.

There were very few opportunities to get involved with activities outside of work as we were not based at the main office in the South bank. I think I heard a mention of weekly football once, but other than that, that was pretty much it. I think there would have been many more if I was based in the South bank office.