HR Intern Review

I thoroughly enjoyed my placement year. The people are friendly (no matter what level they are in the business), the culture is great and there’s always something fun outside of your job to get involved with.

I worked in a small team and ended up getting along with them really well! I felt valued because I was given a lot of responsibility and was trusted to do my job plus anything else that came my way. Outside of work we’d also do lunches/dinners for team birthdays.

I worked on the desk next to my manager so could ask her questions any time she was in the office. If my manager was in a meeting, I had the support of one of my colleagues or the Sr Manager if I had any questions or needed to talk through something. Me and my manager had regular 1-1’s / catch ups about ongoing projects, which meant I could discuss anything I needed support with.

When employees took annual leave during the summer holidays this meant my workload dropped for a month or so. However, as a team we looked in to some additional projects for me to get involved in to stay busy. Due to us being a generalist team, we were spread across lots of areas of HR meaning it does get very busy sometimes- if I was struggling (especially in my first few months) I’d sit down with my manager and she helped me to reprioritise my tasks.

My team trusted me with anything from big projects to my day to day tasks. I was doing similar jobs to that of my colleagues and so was given a lot of responsibility and treated as a valued member of the team.

I have learnt a lot of HR-specific knowledge which will obviously be a big help for my HR modules at uni. The general skills I have learnt will help me massively in my final year of uni overall, e.g. organisation, prioritisation, communicating with people of different levels across the business. I will take these skills forward with me in my future jobs.

The atmosphere and culture was generally very positive, friendly and fun.

As part of our internship, we had lots of training, a day out to an agency, had to complete 2 newsletters and a final intern project.

There is something called Mattel Univeristy which is an internal training and development scheme for employees. Through this we could enrol on to various courses and improve skills such as public speaking or presenting. Outside of this, if I asked my manager for any additional training or the chance to get involved in something else, this was always arranged.

This is a good company to work for and if the opportunity came up I’d definitely apply to work at Mattel again.

Outside of the social committee at work, all of the interns got together for nights out in Reading! As a HR team, we would always celebrate each other’s birthdays by going to lunch or going out for dinner and drinks.

We’re paying higher than average for our rent but this is because we wanted to be closer to Reading - in the surrounding area there are cheaper places to live. Food/drink prices are similar to most areas in the South that are outside of London.

The nightlife in Maidenhead isn’t great, there are a few bars and pubs but that’s it. Reading is really close to Maidenhead and has much more of a nightlife.

There was a charity and social committee so we had lots of opportunities to get involved in events like bowling, film screenings at Disney/Universal, curry nights, going to Maidenhead rowing club etc etc. There’s always something to get involved with and a lot of people go along to the events so it’s good fun.