European Technical Sales Leadership Support Review

There were many parts of the placement I really enjoyed, for example I helped organize and run an event in Sitges (Spain). This gave me a great opportunity to meet all of the European people I had been working with and experience all the elements of running a successful event. Other parts of the role were sometimes boring, for example there were parts where I had to do a lot of manual spreadsheet work or spend lots of times chasing people for information.

Most of the time I felt as valued as a normal employee as we were doing to same work for the same projects. The only times I felt of less value is when a few people knew I was a student I did feel their attitude towards me did change slightly.

Working at IBM you very much need to go out looking for the support, it is not going to come to you. If you do contact your management asking for support though they are always very polite and helpful with the information they come back to you with.

There were days where I had very little work to do so I would be able to focus on learning activities to improve my knowledge of areas like Node-red and Hybrid Cloud. On a normal day I would be quite busy, there were not many days I had to stay too late to complete work.

I was given a lot of responsibility within my placement, although as an Intern you are not often placed on client facing projects with lots of responsibility, you are given a lot of responsibility when working on internal projects whether this be organization of an event or a more technical project.

As a Computer Science student completing a business placement lots of the skills I have developed will be more useful beyond my degree rather than directly for my degree . However I was also given time and opportunity to work on my technical skills as part of my placement year.

The atmosphere in the office was quite good, there were always people in my area which made it a fun area to work in. Occasionally it did get a little bit loud which made it difficult to do some pieces of work, overall it was a good environment to work in.

The organisation process for the interships are split into two parts. On one half you have your task manager - this is your day to day manager who gives you tasks to do. The other half is your Early Professionals Manager (EPM) - this is the personal that manages your personal progress. In my experience communication between both you and your two managers is very important as in some cases your EPM has no idea what you have been doing.

My company is very keen on personal training and development, there were lots of education opportunities that I took part in. There is also an extensive library of online courses to let you learn in the areas you are interested in, there is also some mandatory education in areas such as business conduct which you are required to complete

There are lots of opportunities for graduate employment at IBM, especially if you are interested in consultancy. Outside of consultancy there are much fewer options but I have been informed that no matter what area you go into as a grad you will have the chance to move around the business.

In my base location there were about 100 interns, this allowed for a very good social scene with many opportunities for after work drinks and social events at the weekends. There were many restaurants around the local area which gave good opportunities to go for meals during your lunch break.

Living and socialising in central London is very very expensive, this did reduce the amount of opportunities I could go on after work and at the weekends.

The Nightlife around work was very expensive but also very lively, moving further away from the office it was just as lively and slightly less expensive (although still not cheap).

There were office teams for all types of sports, personally I joined the work football team. This involved playing football for an hour on either Monday or Tuesday night every week.