Technical Marketing Engineer/Technical Sales Specialist Review

I enjoyed my placement a lot. It was fairly stressful and I got given a lot of responsibility, but this helped me grow and I learnt a lot quicker with that kind of pressure. The work I was doing was enjoyable because it was real work, not just making the coffee, etc.

At the start, not so much. This is mostly because I didn't have the skillset to contribute properly yet, so everything I was working on was a lot more contained. In the second half of my internship I really started to feel like a member of the team and was being given customers.

Me and my manager had a face-to-face 1:1 bi-weekly. On top of that I had all my local and remote team members I could go to for help with an issue. There were also friendly people all about the office that could help me out with nearly any problem I had.

I was usually very busy on a daily basis, my manager made sure I always had something to do. If I didn't I'd find something to do. On top of this I usually had a couple of meetings a week (done over skype or in person), both internal and external (with customers).

A lot. Especially near the end. Near the start I was given responsibilities, however they there was usually some kind of safety net in case I couldn’t handle them. After my manager had learnt what I was capable and understood the level of my skillset I was constantly getting work thrown at me.

I learnt a lot of technical skill that are going to be useful for life (linux, vim, nodejs, web-dev, working with mcu’s, gateway & server stuff, etc). I was also able to learn a lot of soft skills, which were arguably more useful. These included stuff like handling customers, professionalism, navigating a corporate environment, etc.

Due to certain circumstances of the company at the time there was low-morale in the office for a part of it, however this sorted itself out after a few months. Generally everyone was really nice and helpful though, because there are also loads of other interns on the placement you never feel alone.

The internship was pretty organised, because of a certain situation in the company there was a period where my team were too busy to make sure I always had work to do. Since the office has been doing placements for years and there were loads of other teams with work to do it wasn’t a problem.

The investment by the company in terms of training and development (for me) came more from giving me projects and helping me out with teaching the stuff I didn’t know. There are also a lot of training sessions and depending on your manager you might get sent out to training on a certain skillset for a day – week.

I can’t really answer this since the hiring process for interns isn’t really exposed. There are a few employees who were previously interns though, so I assume that it depends on how well you managers assess you and whether they think it’s a good fit for you and for the company.

Yeah, the interns usually do something every Thursday and make the best of the location. There are also intern-organised ‘society’s’ that organise events and stuff for all the interns, they usually manage to raise some money for charity. On top of that the company have ‘Great Place to Work’ scheme that usually sees a lot of events happening.

I stayed in my university city since it was commutable and I didn’t want to miss out on my friends who didn’t do a placement’s last year. The cost of commuting added up to quite a lot and the cost of socialising was fairly standard.

The nightlife in the area could have been better. It could also have been waaaaaaay worse though; there were a good couple of pubs and at least one night club. Usually who you go out with makes more of a difference than where you go anyway.

Yeah, for sure. There’s an intern mailing list that most of the interns for that year communicate on and let each other know about stuff going on outside of work. There’s also a lot of events hosted by ‘Great Place to Work’ at the company that has all kinds of offers (cheaper concert tickets, beer festivals, etc).