Visual Merchandising Review

I really enjoyed my time at L'Oreal and would love to work here in the future. I get on so well with my team and although there is a lot of responsibility, I learned so many new skills that I couldn't imagine myself having and my confidence has grown so much! I will be sad to leave the company.

I made so many good friends here at L'Oreal and now have so many good working relationships with multiple people around the company. I do feel sometimes that some colleagues give me some of their work that they just don't want to do rather than don't have time to do which is frustrating when I end up staying late to do their work but that is only on occasions and doesn't happen all the time. Most of the time I feel valued by my colleagues and they recognise the hard work that I do and the value I bring to the team.

I was given a lot of support and guidance by my manager. At L'Oreal you are thrown in at the deep end and are expected to pick things up quickly. Although the handover could have been longer to ensure we fully understood our job roles, I did feel I had support by my manager and she was conscious of our different working strategies and made sure I felt comfortable asking for help.

I am constantly busy at L'Oreal. Even though I have managed to get to a good place with my day to day job role, I did find that any spare time was filled with other jobs from other people and made sure that if I did have some spare time, I was offering to help my manager, get ahead of my work or work on future projects e.g. handover notes

I had so much responsibility at L'Oreal. You are thrown in at the deep end, expected to sort out your own mistakes. Although at the beginning it was very daunting looking after 7 accounts and being responsible for all the in-store POS, it is also very rewarding seeing positive sale numbers from your work and knowing you are doing a good job. However it is very much, if you mess up one account, you mess up a lot of sales and relationships with buyers. I do my day to day job role completely independently and only liaise with my manager about the accounts I manage when there is something that I need to flag or if I have any positive news. I have also started to help my manager on her accounts, giving me even more responsibility.

I have learned so many skills for life and developed skills I had before starting my role. Because of all the factors above; being so busy, having responsibility, being valued, you really are treated as a full time employee which forces you to learn skills such as communication, time management, organisation which are vital beyond University. My confidence has grown so much and that will allow me to try new things which I never would have considered before my placement year

The general atmosphere is very positive in the office. Although most people are stressed quite a lot of the time, we do make sure that we don't reflect that on other people. My team are so lovely that if anyone is ever stressed or upset, they will do everything and anything they can to help out. We have team drinks/events quite a lot and even just coffee's and general chat during the day helps keep the positive vibes throughout the office. Because CPD is such a fast paced environment, it does mean that people are stressed 70% of the time, but that doesn't stop us having fun and laughing!

I believe the whole placement has been very well set up. The only recommendations I would give would be to have a longer handover as a week isn't long enough to lean all the responsibilities that you will be taking on for the rest of the year. Also, although HR are there to help us when needed, I do feel like they do let us just get on with everything, it would be nice to have like an intern drinks once every few months in the cafe with HR so that they can go round people and find out how everyone is doing, whether it is positive or negative feedback. This would help us feel more inclined to feedback to HR otherwise I think myself and some other people feel like we can't go to them to share positive or negative news. However, the training throughout the year has helped us to continually improve our working skills.

I believe the company invests time in training and developing interns as a whole but not individually. Although in our MAP forms we are given objectives etc, but I felt like sometimes those objectives were forgotten about and left. It feels almost that an interns individual development relies completely on the intern, where as I feel like managers and HR can also help invest time in helping us to figure out how we are going to develop ourselves.

I would love to work at L'Oreal in the future as I have thoroughly enjoyed my time here and would love to continue to develop myself in the company.

All the interns have been very social and I have made some friends for life in the interns. We had a few socials which were really fun, however it would have been good if the company could have continued café 255 drinks and then we wouldn't have to spend money all the time!

The cost of living in my area wasn't too bad. It was cheaper than I would have expected however the socialising in London has been very expensive and on an intern wage, it has been very difficult to socialise as much as I would have liked!

There are lots of cool places to go out in London however most of them are very expensive so I haven't tended to go out a lot! I have probably been back to uni more to go out instead of go out in London!

There are lots of opportunities, but L'Oreal doesn't help with that. I had to go and find a company to continue to play netball. We had an intern sports sec who was meant to sort out netball and there was a lot of interest however this was never organised so I did some research myself and sorted out a team. It would be good if L'Oreal could provide us with a list of websites where people can join us to sports such as netball or dance because then work colleagues would be able to take part together if multiple people are interested