Enterprise Applications 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 RFS manager, 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 RFS owner 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.

I have gained a range of skills throughout my placement and I believe many of them will assist me with future education and post-graduate employment. For example, I have experienced working with agile methodologies. I believe that for development teams, this is the best way to ensure client satisfaction. I have also gained some useful analytical and problem-solving skills which I believe are transferable to a range of tasks I may face in the future. Finally, I have discovered some pivotal presentation techniques which may aid me hugely in a client facing role.

IBM’s hursley office is far more relaxed than the majority of IBM’s UK offices. For starters, we have a rather informal dress code. I very rarely saw someone in business wear in and around Hursley. Secondly, I found that, compared to other companies I have worked at, there seems to be less of a hierarchical presence at IBM. To elaborate, I was able to speak to my team lead as a friend rather than the band 8 manager that he actually was. The general atmosphere within my team was very light hearted at times. I think this made for a much more enjoyable environment to work in.

Overall, the work placement at IBM in general is very well structured. There are pre-determined milestones and regular reviews with an Early Professional Manager to ensure that interns are on track to having a successful placement year. However, I feel that my role in particular was rather poorly organised. I didn’t feel that there was any kind of push towards me following a structured progression throughout the placement. I was left with the smaller, yet tedious, tasks most of the time and was only involved with bigger tasks if I expressed an interest in the area.

In terms of my personal development in the role, I found that team members were often very busy and therefore had little free time to train me in areas I needed to develop in. However, in terms of personal development in areas of interest, I was lucky enough to have networked with enough people outside of my team to provide the perfect contacts to do so. For example, towards the end of my placement, I was interested in a career in consultancy and was able to shadow a graduate consultant at and IBM office in London.

IBM offers a range of graduate schemes which promise structured nurturing and training. Personally, I am compelled towards the ‘Consulting by Degrees’ graduate scheme offered at IBM. This is the graduate scheme for starting a career in consultancy. During the placement, all interns are invited to attend a careers academy. During this, we were able to gather a rich insight into the graduate prospects available through the company.

The social scene was one of the reasons I chose to accept the job offer at Hursley. I was fortunate enough to be part of a 65-intern intake during my placement year and as a result there were countless social events which took place throughout my placement. This created a university-like atmosphere to the work placement and resulted in everyone fitting into the scene fairly seamlessly.

Winchester is a relatively cheap place to live. The biggest cost whilst living here was travel. With few and far possibilities for public transport, I opted to buy a car to aid my travel for the year and this proved expensive despite working out cheaper than catching busses. Other than this, rent was cheap (I paid £300 per month for renting a bedroom in a 4-bedroom house), drinks at local pubs are relatively cheap (rarely more than £3.50 for a drink and the pay is certainly enough to live off whilst also allowing interns to save.

Nightlife in Winchester wasn’t great in terms of clubs. However, there are a great choice of pubs and bars in and around the city. With such a large group of interns, we often opted for house parties as our preferred form of entertainment on weekends and being positioned a taxi ride away from Southampton, we were also able to visit some of the nightclubs on offer in the southwest.

IBM have a scheme called GiveBack. This provides interns, graduates and apprentices the opportunity to get involved with some tasks outside of their daily role. I took part in a careers event at my university as an example of this. In addition to giveback there are also some opportunities within the company for interns to apply for.