Innovation Analyst Review

Overall, it was enjoyable. I've learned many new skills and got to experience working in a professional setting with a huge variety of people. There was a major problem though lasting several months when we had no manager, which is challenging for anyone but especially so for an intern in their first salaried job.

I've worked in two teams over my placement, and in both teams I've made close connections with my coworkers (some of whom were interns, and many who weren't) and was overall treated as part of the team.

The placement team were great and my Early Professionals Manager was extremely supportive. However, midway through the year our team of four interns was disbanded, and our task manager (who was supposed to continue as our task manager for the time being) rarely checked in, was hard to get a hold of and refused to update us on the process of getting us new roles. This lasted for several months, resulting in a lot of frustration on our part. Eventually I managed to move to a new team and the old intern team got new management and matters improved a lot, but this still took up between 4 and 6 months of our placements.

For the most part, I had a suitable amount of work and was able to make more. However, there was a point when we were getting to the end of a project and our team wasn't given any new work, regardless of how much we tried to check in, resulting in a few weeks of boredom.

I was given responsibility which matched well with my skill and experience level over projects and products. I made and maintained small apps which were used in business processes by various people, so I was making a real business impact with my work.

I am a pre-university placement student. My degree will be in Computer Science and Mathematics, and the skills I have picked up will be helpful for managing my coursework in my degree. I learned more soft professional skills than I did hard technical skills which is great, because that complements my degree perfectly.

The atmosphere is generally quite good. I always sat with my team, so we got to know each other well and become friends. We also had team events quite regularly which added to the team spirit, both for the smaller teams and for the larger sections of the organisation that owned them, which let us meet everyone who worked near us.

The early professionals team did a great job organising a placement for us, but that organisation fell through and nobody was able to organise a new task for us and we weren't allowed to look for other placement roles in the larger organisation although some existed because our manager insisted that a new task will eventually be found, although this took several months.

There are a lot of self-paced training courses on our online learning platform which we can take if we want but those are all optional. There were also several optional events through the year for interns to learn more about various roles, talk to managers and learn soft skills, which we were invited to if our project could release us and we paid for our own travel.

The lack of organisation in my role really put me off coming back. If everything were to go well this would be a great place to work, but in my experience and having spoken to some others in other Early Professional roles, if something goes wrong with a role it often goes wrong in a major and frustrating way and there isn't always someone to talk to about it.

The interns were fairly close. In the 'futures' scheme I was in we had quarterly meetings which were great fun and which we planned ourselves, and a lot of interns became very close. There were many group chats and other groups for interns to talk in. You get to meet a lot of people and it's really up to you to stay in contact.

I've worked in two areas, Swindon and London. Both of them are professional areas so the cost of living is somewhat high, especially London. The options in Swindon were quite limited as well so to socialise most people left Swindon for the weekends, but that also adds travel costs. London is quite expensive as well.

I worked in London and Swindon. There is very little night life in Swindon. London obviously has a huge number of options available for anyone who is interested. The London offices I worked at were in Southbank and near Bank so they were very central and getting anywhere was easy.

There was always something to do if you wanted to, including 'giveback', which is work outside of your role, company sport teams and various events. You are heavily encouraged to take up at least one piece of giveback, which is generally internal work making tools, educational materials, planning events, etc.