HR Summer Placement Review

Overall, I really enjoyed my placement at Centrica. It was a really supportive working environment and I was given a reasonable amount of work throughout the summer. It felt like Centrica really valued my work and my contributions to the team. At Centrica, the grad team invest in your future- they want you to stay on for the grad scheme!

At first, it was a difficult adjustment and I found it challenging to connect with my colleagues. I was the only intern on my team and there were no other grads as well. 10 weeks is a short time to connect to people, but I felt like I did my best to foster my team relationships. By the end, I felt like my team really valued my project and had some great feedback on it!

My management was great throughout the course of the internship. I had two line managers and they were both incredibly supportive, but also understood my learning and management style preferences. I am very independent, and they noticed that from the beginning. They gave me space to be creative, gave me lots of responsibility, and did not micro-manage.

My level of busyness depended from day to day. At the start, there was lots of do and so many experiences to take in. By about week two or three, it felt a bit slow because my project had come to a bit of a standstill. weeks four through seven were super busy with project work. Once I delivered on my project in week eight, however, things seemed to slow down and at times it felt like I was making work for myself.

As I said earlier, my management team were great about giving me responsibility. I was set with a project right from the start and told I could take it in any direction I chose. No one was mandating what I had to do (or when I had to do it) so I felt very independent in terms of setting my own deadlines and goals. When I presented my project to the team, I felt like they really listened and discussed my findings in a valuable way.

In terms of my degree, I don't think that the skills I learned are particularly valuable beyond time management and creativity (which I had already developed previously). However, the skills I learned on my placement (stakeholder management, presenting, understanding of my business area) will certainly help me in my future career. I definitely increased my business acumen throughout the course of my internship- something I essentially did not have before.

I switched between offices and travelled quite a bit over the course of my placement because of the nature of my role and my team (most people on my team worked from different offices or from home). So I was only ever in my main office a maximum of 3 days per week on average. I would say overall the vibe at the Windsor office is more corporate than the Manchester office. However, the most 'fun' office I visited was the Hive office in London- very start-up like.

The organizers of the internship were fantastic. Our accommodation was sorted for us in advance (and paid for, no less) which meant we could move in straight away. There was never any confusion over where we needed to be when, and there was a good amount of development days- enough to allow us to engage with other interns/grads but not too much that it pulled us away from our work.

Centrica did an incredible job in making sure we felt valued and like they wanted us to be there. They truly care about your development. This is not the kind of internship where they accept loads of people only to take a small percentage of them onto the grad scheme. From the start, Centrica gives the impression that you were chosen for a reason- and that reason is to develop you so that you can move onto the grad scheme.

Centrica really hires its interns with the plan to develop and progress them into the grad scheme. While I do not currently know the outcome of my internship, I have no doubt that many of the current interns will be offered jobs at Centrica as graduates and have a great future there.

My cohort of interns in the office was very close as there were not many of us in our particular location. This had positives and negatives. We all grew very close to one another throughout the course of the internship, however we sometimes felt isolated from the interns down in Windsor (that was where the majority of interns were based). We went out a couple of times throughout the summer, but at the weekends people typically went home/had other plans. We would go out for dinner midweek sometimes.

I was based in Manchester throughout the summer. Because we didn't have to worry about rent and bills, the cost of living and socialising was much more reasonable. Manchester was pretty inexpensive for going out to bars and clubs, and the food scene was very exciting but inexpensive as well.

Manchester has incredible nightlife! I don't feel that I took proper advantage of it while I was here, but Manchester is known for having fantastic nights out at a good price. It's the perfect place for students and a great place to live in over the course of the summer.

There wasn't loads to get involved with outside of work. We had one day where we did charity, but we still did it within the office. I know that some people who were on the internship got involved with weekly football matches over the summer, but other than that there wasn't much going on.