Project Management Office (PMO) Analyst Review

When I was searching for Industrial Placement, IBM immediately stood out as one of the places that I would like to work for. Months after, I was fortunate enough to be offered an intern position within IBM. Being here was one of most interesting and useful experience that I had in my life so far, especially when working for a company that never cease to amaze with their products and the way they shape the world. I fully enjoyed my time within IBM as I felt that I was making an impact and was really valued for my performance. I was offered active guidance throughout the year and would love to come back in IBM as a Graduate.

As I was working mostly with graduates, my team was often changing after 2 or 3 months, but I can proudly say that I was fortunate enough to work in a team that cared for me and my actions. Working with my peers, I have always felt that we truly embraced the feeling of a team by encouraging each others to push our limits into achieving the goals set up by our manager or by always giving a hand to anyone that was in need.

Thing that I was about to found out only after I joined IBM company, was that they pay very close attention to their younger employees and new-starters. As far as I am concerned, whether it was about my Task Manager or my EPM, I have always felt that there is someone that I can seek guidance and advice from. I highly valued the fact that IBM cares about their interns by oftenly organising networking and social events to encourage younger employees to find out more from other employees what IBM truly has to offer in terms of knowledge and job opportunities.

As far as my role was concerned, I can say that I had often to deal with a tight schedule. As the role is highly client-faced, I was usually engaged in numerous calls with the client in order to provide them with updates regarding their ongoing projects. Apart from that, I had to always ensure that my projects have the right people engaged in order to conduct them to a successful delivery. All in all, I can say that my day was pretty busy, but this was in fact the thing that challenged me to push myself over the limit in order to improve my skills and to become a great future professional.

As an intern, you have to fortune to have a good amount on responsibility of your shoulders, which in turn helps the individual to be more aware about their actions and duties. Being an intern means that you are entirely responsible for what is happening with your project and you would be fully accountable if something is not in the right place. This challenged me to become more self-aware as a person and helped me by improving my time-management skills when dealing with multiple actions in a short period of time.

Choosing to study an International Business Management Programme at University of Surrey has proved to be a useful choice for my future career. Having 2 years of study of the business world, helped to understand how people behave when doing business, how relationships between employee and employer can be developed and finally improved my critical thinking in terms of business decision making. We oftenly had to discuss and draft assignments during our tutorials about real-life events regarding a good or bad decision of a company and how that decision or approach impacted the corporate and social environment.

Whenever I was in the office, I always felt welcomed and relaxed. Even though my day looked like being a terribly busy one, being in the office, around my team always helped me focus on what are my priorities. Having somebody that is willing to work alongside you proves to be an invaluable asset when working for a company. My team and I were usually taking our lunch break together and tried to avoid taking about work or things that could create pressure on us. This was like a breath of fresh air for most of us, getting us ready to provide the same level of professionalism for the second part of the day.

My placement in IBM was greatly organized from the first day of Induction. It has been clearly highlighted from the day one how our overall scheme looks like and what IBM would like to see from us. This helped every intern to shape their careers within IBM and in turn helped every individual to set their own goals to achieve.

IBM is a lot about future employees. They were always sending us emails about different event conference that we would have the opportunity to be in, showing a great amount of interest regarding the younger generations. Furthermore, plenty of technical and commercial events were organized for the younger employees, solely with the aim of improving and boosting their knowledge into becoming a great profession in the future.

With IBM being a global organization, here are countless of opportunities that everyone would find their place. With such variety of roles that one can perform within IBM organization, I strongly believe that the company offers a vast amount of appealing prospects for shaping a great future career in the industry.

Depending on your primary location, you get different exposure to fellow students. I was based in Southbank, home to around 100 (or more) interns, so it was always very sociable and fun to work at. However, if you are based in more distant offices, it may be that there will be only 20 other interns working with you - which I guess is therefore the case of quality over quantity.

On average, every intern has spent around £700 for the living, £100+ for travelling and £200 for entertainment a month. It all very much depends on what area of London you end up at.

Amazing! London provides a full range of entertainment that would suit any party type. so there were many opportunities to go out.

IBM offers a vast variety of outside of office activities with the aim of helping the employees to take their mind of the work pressure. In IBM, networking is a key factor in developing a great career, therefore the company wants to ensure that offers many opportunities as social events to their people.