Technical Support Analyst Review

Overall, my placement year at IBM was a fantastic experience which has opened many doors for me and my future career. Before coming to IBM I did not understand what I wanted to do as career after my degree. However with IBM being such a big company and having the ability to build a network and initiate conversations and shadowing opportunities,

During the initial months of my placement, there were very few tasks available for me to get involved with given the lack of experience and skills in the profession. However, after developing in the role and learning more about how the team functioned, I was gradually given more responsibility. By the half way stage to my internship I was an integral part of the team and this continued to be the case for the remainder of my placement.

This is the area I feel is in need of the most improvement. Much of my team adopted remote working or worked at other IBM offices within the UK and Europe. This meant that I very rarely had face-to-face support or guidance from a senior member of the team. I feel that this would have been my preferred way of learning rather following pre-written tutorials and conversing over video-chat. I was able to pick up the necessary skills over the course of my placement, however I feel that it could have been achieved far quicker if I had been involved with more face-to-face collaboration.

Throughout the placement, I experienced times of having very little to do, coupled with occasions where I was tied with heavy amounts of work. Unfortunately, I was not in control of my workload. At times when I had very little to do, I would ask to get involved with other tasks within the team as a priority but was often told that there wasn’t anywhere I could help at the time. Instead, during these times, I signed up to activities outside of my role through IBM’s GiveBack scheme.

During the first half of my placement, I was given the freedom to move around the team to work available tasks that matched my interests. Over this period, managers had relatively low expectations of me and anything I produced was given high praise. During the second half of the placement, I was given more direct responsibilities. For example, it became my duty to ensure that our products were distributed correctly to clients on a daily basis.

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.