Intern Business Analyst Review

A placement at IBM is very rewarding. You will gain valuable experience that will set you up for the rest of your career, and you will have the support of colleagues from all levels of the organisation. This was my experience on placement and it made my work very enjoyable.

My colleagues at IBM were very supportive and provided a number of opportunities for me to grow and develop my skills. Everyone at IBM has your best interests in mind—whether this is people you work with on a daily basis or colleagues that you work with every now and again.

At IBM you will have a manager from the Internship scheme (Foundation manager), and a manager that you work with on a daily basis (task manager). Your Foundation manager is there to make sure you have a valuable experience at IBM and your task manager sets your daily tasks. Not only will you have two managers, but often you will find mentors and coaches in the other IBMers you work with. This support is brilliant for your experience on placement.

Busy! It depends how much you want to get involved with and how effective you are with managing your time. I like to be busy and I work better this way. It felt like IBM had unlimited opportunities for me to get involved with. I was never bored. But remember that opportunities don’t always come directly to you—often you have to show initiative and enthusiasm for work you would like to pursue. From my experience, whenever I did this I was supported and encouraged.

From the offset I was given more responsibility than I could have imagined—this was challenging but very rewarding. It meant that I developed skills quickly whilst delivering work that my managers were pleased with. Towards the second half of my year I was given the responsibility to go to client meetings and work on sales proposals.

The skills I have developed on placement will help me in my last year of university and in the rest of my career. I have secured a place on the IBM graduate programme and I look forward to going back. I have rated this as 8 because whilst there was not formal training on the undergraduate scheme I am looking forward to attending the technical and commercial training on the graduate programme.

General atmosphere in the office was good. Often IBMers are on client sites—whilst I can’t speak for the atmosphere there, I can say that in the IBM office on South Bank it was a fun and vibrant place to work. It is great to be in the centre of London too.

Could be better but the support is good when you need it—I changed roles in my first 3 months of being on placement. This no fault of anyone in particular but I feel that the scheme could have been more proactive and organised with helping me. However, once I asked for help I was immediately helped.

Not very much... Often the IBM answer to this is an online platform called ‘Your Learning’ which is accessible to any IBMer. However there isn’t set times for you to be able to do this, and there is only so much you can learn on a screen. It would be better if IBM provided class room training and development, at least for the first few months. This would mean interns could get up to speed faster. I proposed this idea and this was taken on board.

I’ve got a job on the graduate programme which I am very happy about. I am excited to go back and work on exciting projects. I am looking forward to further training opportunities and work that I find rewarding. The graduates that I spoke to whilst at IBM enjoyed their work.

The social scene was good! In terms with the social scene within the intern/graduate network—it really depends if you are in an IBM office. For instance, I was in Southbank and it was a great environment. But if you are in a quieter IBM office or on a client site you might not have the same experience. You often don’t have a lot of control over this which is why I am rating this an 8.

In London everything is expensive and I just scraped by on the wage. You can’t expect to be paid more by IBM (given that it is an internship) and they also pay London based interns slightly more to cover the cost of living in London. Just be prepared to budget.

It was good. This isn’t really a priority for me...but it is nice to have bars around for getting to know your colleagues better. London has lots on offer—I would recommend looking on TimeOut and EventBrite for activities and events on. Look for events that correlate with your career interests, like talks on A.I for instance.

Yep loads of acitivities to get involved with. London has lots on offer—I would recommend looking on TimeOut and EventBrite for activities and events on. Look for events that correlate with your career interests, like talks on A.I for instance. I went to a few conferences that IBM were speaking at—sometimes you can get funding to attend. Be organised if you want to pursue an opportunity like this.