Applications Engineer/ Sales development engineer Review

Really enjoyed it. Fab people, great atmosphere and perks, challenging work (although at times frustrating - think having to explain how to install LabVIEW for the umpteenth time). Treat it more like a job than a placement. I'd say not everyone would be suited though - you have to like talking to people you don't know on the phone in order to enjoy it.

There are loads of interns and grads there, and (cringey though it is), you end up feeling like a family. Most people there are fairly young, 20s and 30s. Managment make a point of acknowledging the work done in Applications Engineering, although it is clear that you are bottom of the food chain at the company and sometimes you get landed with the work no-one else wants to do.

Depends who your boss is. Mine was fairly hands-off so I mostly got on with things myself or asked the people around me if I was stuck on anything. But most people are very approachable, even in other departments and countries (Skype). There's plenty of training too. You have to be confident in making your own decisions - don't expect support on everything. You are technical support, after all.

There's basically a bottomless pile of work in Applications Engineering - always more customers needing help. I didn't once find myself with nothing to do. Sales was even more intense. Targets are tough to meet - expect your statistics to be measured and compared to those of others. You get good at task switching, as often you'll be writing an email and a call will come through.

You're speaking to customers directly from your 7th week, once you've done some training. You know the company's reputation is at stake. A lot of the companies you are working with are big names, and the engineers you are assisting might have been using LabVIEW since before you were born. In Sales, you get to have conversations about large amounts of money. You can also take on additional responsibilities e.g. organising social events

I can now rattle off an email in seconds, give better presentations, use the powers of influence I picked up in sales, plus all of the technical stuff (CLD certification, general debugging/problem solving etc) - perhaps not all relevent to my degree, but very useful in the world of work! Probably Electronics would be the most relevent degree, but you get people from other engineering backgrounds and physics. You could quite easily go and work for a team of LabVIEW developers afterwards. Also, you speak to scientists and engineers from lots of different industries so get to hear about what their job entails

Pranks are approved of as long as they're reversible. You're not chained to a desk and you can take breaks to talk to people provided you don't take the mick. The office itself is pretty nice - could be slightly cleaner but is light and airy, lots of crazy desk accessories, nice meeting rooms. People mostly dress casually unless they are seeing customers, pretty relaxed in that respect. Sometimes morale is a bit low in the department e.g. when there were job eliminations or the workload is very high. The people you are interacting with can be frustrating sometimes, or take it out on you.

Good HR department. They send you lots of info in advance, training is well structured. They've been taking interns for so long that it's very well planned.

Financially - a lot. If you got up the price of all of the courses you complete, it comes to tens of thousands of pounds. They let you play with hardware that costs a similar amount, the sort of stuff that your university might not be able to afford easily so it's hard to get trained up on otherwise. People from across the company take time out to deliver training sessions for you. You usually get a weekly 'phone skills' one-on-one session and a meeting with your manager, so they also put the time in too. There's a variety of specific training courses throughout the year, and you can also self-pace programming courses online - that's if you can find the time!

I'm not going back, mostly because I wasn't the best fit and I have other plans for what I want to do long term. But everyone's different. If you're into traveling Europe to teach courses, or driving around doing sales, you might love it. It seems people either stay 5-10 years then move on, or stick it out and become managers

People are always up to go do things in the evenings. Depending on where you're from, Newbury might feel a bit sleepy as it's a town. You see people at the gym, football sessions etc. If you choose to live in Reading and commute in, you might not see people as much and would miss out on spontaneous drinks. If you like the city, it's much cheaper to get the train there when you fancy it than to actually live there. Sometimes the line is blurred between social and professional e.g. evening networking sessions.

If you're from the North, it'll feel expensive. Especially for a pint. It's not a student town so lots of people end up renting flats that are more geared towards working professionals. But it has cheap supermarkets (Aldi, Lidl) , a couple of weatherspoons etc., and they subsidise transport if you don't drive in on your own. So car sharing or cycling can save you a bit of cash.

I liked it - there are loads of good pubs. If you like going out-out there are less options.

Gym, charity events, football. Lots of people are quite sporty. But there's not a huge range unless you're happy to do join clubs from town on your own. People would stay in the break room after work to play table tennis or on the Nintendo wii. Or stay behind to work on an individual creative project.