Summer Technology Intern 2020 Review

I really enjoyed working at Barclays. This internship has been during the whole Covid fun so working remotely. Remotely working isn't ideal, that said that said the Early Careers Team did an excellent job of still creating a huge number of speaker events, networking and panel events. IT issues did make this a little more difficult than I would have liked but it was still overall a great experience and one I'd 100% do again tomorrow.

My colleagues always made me feel extremely valued, reaching out and offering support. As part of the internship we were asked to reach out to a small number of Director or Managing Director level employees. Even these extremely busy individuals often responded to out of the blue emails and were happy to schedule calls into their busy diaries. They made me feel very valued, despite only being at Barclays as an intern they were happy to spend their valuable time on me.

My manager and I had one to one calls regularly(three times a week) and as such he was always offering guidance and support. My managers Boss also ended up spending a lot of time directing me, she too was supportive and offered a lot of help. Moreover everyone at Barclays internships(and maybe jobs too idk) is given a senior mentor, basically an older, more superior employee who has can also offer big picture guidance. My senior mentor and I had further calls once a week.

I was probably just busy enough, maybe a little on the quiet side. Admittedly I had IT issues which did limit my availability to the work I had hoped to be getting on with so this will have made me more free than most, but really come to Barclays expecting to work 9-5. They certainly don't ask you to dedicate your existence to them with crazy hours and bar the first few days of adminy setup, your not really sat on your hands wondering whats going on either, its a good amount of busy.

IT issues prevented my access to developer tools and as such I was not able to actually write software/automation tests during my placement. This was frustrating and did limit my responsibility. That said my Line manager did still manage to get me involved with some active projects so my contributions did have value and I was given responsibility. If the tools had installed correctly(as they did for many other interns) I would've been given a lot of responsibility, as it was I has some but not as much as Id like.

I'm confident the skills and experience I've gained from this internship will be of great value moving forward. While IT issues prevented as much hands on development as I'd hoped, this provided opportunity to gain a lot of experience at all stages of the software development life cycle, looking at how many different teams would contribute to one project and the handovers between those teams. Moreover this time allowed me to really lever Barclays training tools so I've learnt a lot!

I worked from Home, this is obviously unideal but still allowed the internship to go ahead during Covid. Working at home inst the best but the Early Careers team have worked hard to make it as enjoyable as possible and I think they've done a great job. In terms of support and whatnot, its all still be available to us, tho virtually now rather than in person. So yeah, I guess good atmosphere in the office.

This was the first year it was ran online rather than in person and it doesn't show at all. Besides a few frustrating IT issues the experience has been seamless and very well managed by the Early Careers team. This is the benefit of a bigger Cooperation, there is much much more organisation going on. We had a lot of calls for speaker sessions and whatnot, lots of interaction and really happy with how it was organised:)

We were given access to Pluralsight an excellent online resource for technical training, I ended up completing numerous courses, a personal favorite was Security Event Triage: Detecting Network Anomalies with Behavioral Analysis but really there is all sorts on there. In terms of compliance training and all that side of things we were given access to an intranet site which contained lots of resources and courses to complete, we were required to do a small amount of this, but with scope to do more if wanted.

A lot of interns are offered places at Barclays, personally I'm hoping to be offered a place and at time of writing plan to accept it. I've had a really fun time here, and would look forward to spending more time here in the coming years. Would definitely recommend looking strongly at a Barclays internship. Specifically I did the Technology Summer internship but I'm sure all facets of the business are equally as enticing to the right people :)

Despite Covid trying its hardest to disrupt the internship it went ahead and we still did have a pretty good social scene. I'm sure if it had been in person the social scene would have been much better but even as it was there was a great number of networking events that allowed us to connect. Moreover we did end up with a huge Group chat of more or less all the interns who should have been at that site, so we had a good community.

Not applicable- worked from home

Not applicable- worked from home

Not applicable- worked from home