E-Retail Intern Review

I enjoyed my placement a great deal. I found my skills developed very quickly and my colleagues gave me plenty of assistance. I've found the staff to be friendly and supportive and HR to be very responsive. There is plenty of free food offered, a good amount of work life balance for interns and in the Summer everyone gets to leave a few hours early on Friday. Working from home is another perk extended to interns, generally done once per week. There's a heavy level of administrative work but this is to be expected in an internship, I still found I learned from this sort of work.

My colleagues were very encouraging and grateful when I did tasks for them. We enjoyed chatting and there was a good atmosphere in my team. Team members gave good advice where required. A couple of peripheral colleagues could be a bit difficult, but this is to be expected in a large company.

I was given a great amount of advice and guidance by my managers, which was appreciated. I felt I was always able to ask my managers and superiors any questions I had. Expect to be in charge of your graduate scheme application though, HR are in charge of that side of things so team managers often won't be given all the details from HR. To avoid risk of late submission get everything done early!

It depended day by day. Some days you feel as if you can't possibly complete all the work, other days were quiet. Eventually you learn to prioritise and some less important tasks can be reduced in scope or not done. I felt the level of business was always acceptable. To an extent you decide how busy you are, I'd encourage interns to allocate more time to what they find interesting and try new things - L'Oréal loves it when you do this as long as it's still closely related to your role.

I was given a great amount of autonomy on the basics of my role and what was absolutely required of me. I was encouraged to expand my role and my team would be happy for me to work on ideas I came up with. I found it difficult to think of new things I could implement in my role, I'd advise setting aside some time to think about this and consulting colleagues.

It's very difficult to say. I enhanced my ability with various software, which may be useful. I generally improved my ability to be organised and my broader professional skillset, but this would likely be the case in any position. I need to engage more with the training before I know whether it will assist me with my degree, certainly there are offers of training which could be beneficial.

There was a nice buzz around the office most of the time I was here. The staff are quite friendly and relatively relaxed. I'm sure there are workplaces with better atmospheres but this ranks highly. People just get on with their jobs, chat a bit and enjoy the occasional social events as they come around.

I wasn't provided with all the necessary information from HR, but for the most part it was fine. I would suggest reaching out to HR and requesting any information new starters receive upon beginning your role. A bit more structured training would have been nice but some is provided already, overall I'd say it's pretty well-oiled and with minimal effort on your part you can make it a great experience.

I certainly attended some training and got something out of that, but I would have liked more. Enquire about training you could enrol on and ask others what they've found helpful. I found the on-the-job work developed me quite a lot, it was interesting seeing a big company from the inside and being a part of that. You'd certainly feel like you had a proper internship experience, which is development in its own right.

There's a grad scheme you can apply for which has 20 positions, there are about 100 interns. Plenty don't apply for the scheme, but it's very competitive. There's also talent track which you can apply for, this is more flexible than a grad scheme and simply means you'll be considered sooner for relevant jobs which come along. I don't know how many people get on to talent track, but there seems to be a good range of options.

Not really in my experience, there seemed to be occasional events that happened. Some people get in with a good group of friends and some don't. Everyone is friendly though, and reasonably chatty at social events. Expect to put in a good amount of effort to make a bunch of friends here. However those who aren't interns seem to do more outside of work in general, possibly because they've known each other longer.

Quite expensive outside of the building, typical for London though. There's a Wetherspoons around the corner and 2 Tesco Metros not far away, so if you want to live on the cheap you can. L'Oréal pay well for an internship though, and provide free food reasonably regularly. The canteen upstairs is subsidised and has okay prices.

I didn't engage with it, there's some decent pubs and a pretty good sports bar. There might be a couple of clubs. Hammersmith underground station is nearby though, I'd expect there are good clubs somewhere in London you'll be able to access them fairly easily. I'd suggest researching this beforehand if this is important to you.

I think there was a running club and Yoga after work mentioned, and a bunch of people meet up for football once per week. If there was more variety in clubs on offer that would be nice, if you don't like football, Yoga or running clubs there isn't really much going on.