Credit Risk Placement Review

I would say I enjoyed the placement and it's location within London which gave me a great experience of what living/working/commuting in London is all about and what I'd like to ideally do when I eventually go applying for graduate positions in London. Furthermore work content wise wasn't what I expected from it, with less responsibility given to me than was originally expected. Although from a work perspective LBG provided me with excellent opportunities to network and the fellow placement students on the scheme in my office made the work and experience more bearable.

I never felt that I was valued too highly by my superiors above me other than the managers in my team who were responsible for my larger projects, in terms of the lesser work to fill out the rest of my time, that always seemed to be taken up by the analysts and assistant managers in my team who seemed reluctant to let me on any jobs that could've furthered my knowledge of fraud risk. As such the learning experience deteriorated as my exposure to the team was lessened by their reluctance to give me more tasks.

The managers in my team were very good at giving me projects and feedback to get stuck into, but due to them being very busy I wouldn't get these opportunities all that often, so was often left with the projects/small jobs that the assistant managers would give me which they would rarely give me time to ask questions about or gain help with them so as such most of my work was completed by me having to try and find things out myself.

Due to my major projects coming from the managers and those managers not having a lot of time to give me jobs I often found myself bored and sitting around waiting for new work to be thrown at me by reluctant assistant managers which in turn resulted in me struggling to gain good employee ratings due to line managers marking me down for lack of work delivered despite asking to have lots of work thrown at me.

Little responsibility was given to me with only a few regular weekly/daily jobs given to me to do with these being fairly simple and mundane jobs to be completing. This was down to the line managers not really trusting me with work they could do easily themselves and as such boost their deliverables up with on their own performance reviews

The main positive from this placement was that I was able to develop my coding ability in SAS and SQL during all the free time I had during my days, which when applying for grad roles and further jobs will prove invaluable to have on my CV and further roles. By way of assisting my degree studies I found that having the regular routine of having to work a proper job 5 days a week for a year with 23 days holiday will help aid me in my time allocation and consistency with my final year of my degree.

I generally found I had loads in common with other IPs with lots of time spent with them outside of work, thus meaning my time in the office wasn't entirely boring from the role, and this in turn resulted in a fun atmosphere in the office that my other friends in London doing placements didn't seem to have when comparing the Lloyds programme to theirs.

I found that the placement scheme wasn't run too well, with my interaction with other IPs not starting till about a month into my placement whereas other people on the scheme in larger teams were organised in networking with others far earlier than I was due to the unorganised nature of my team with their approach to the scheme and the placement student they gained. Alongside this I found that higher up with regards to job offers and team allocation it took longer to find out finer details of my role compared to other schemes.

Lloyds did give me a good amount of training in the coding element of the role, due to not having any prior exposure to coding elements from my course so they gave me a weeks training alongside other IPs to fully get to grips with the content of the coding element of the role which will stand me in good stead later on when applying for grad roles. Other than this I found the mandatory trainings and other such online modules to be particularly ineffective and a bit of a waste of my time due to uninteresting and unengaging content

I have a guaranteed interview with 2 managers that if it goes well will hopefully mean I have a shot at a further role, but the likelihood of this resulting in a job is very slim due to the number of grad roles decreasing. As well as this the only IPs likely to gain a further role are ones who get on well with their managers who will in turn give them better scoring reviews than managers who don't like their IP as much.

Yes, another of the main positives of the placement was that the fellow cohort of IPs were fairly like minded and as such resulted in a larger social scene after the 9-5 finished, with long weekends abroad with IPs I found that it was a much better scheme for generally meeting other IPs in the firm and getting to know them than other smaller schemes in and around London.

I had guaranteed monthly expenses of £700 rent, £90 travel card and £70 on sport memberships, which meant after taking this off the salary I had just about enough to live fairly comfortably with food and going out with friends so the salary definitely covered most of the basic expenses all fine but I found I couldn't go out and experience London as much due to the disposable income not being too large.

I worked in Bishopsgate which bordered Shoreditch, which was a hub for a decent night out in London. However this area I only went out in a handful of times due to the large expense of going out in London on a weekend and the lateness of trying to get back home from a night out.

There was around about a weekly drinks on a Thursday within the office that was open to anyone who wanted to go along. As well as this there was a weekly office football session that came at a cost of £7.50 a session but was only just down the road from the office so worked out quite nicely