Operations and Projects Year in Industry Student Review

My role was in the Operations and projects team, on a day to day basis this involved a variety of different tasks. Some including ongoing project management and support for new projects, and sometimes more of the post go live work around measuring the benefits and if the project was a success. This involved working with a variety of people from varying levels of the business as high as Directors.

I have learnt a lot about time management due to having multiple deadlines to work towards so a need to balance and prioritise different tasks was a key skill. My people skills has improved as well as you have to develop relationships very quickly as new people join a project in order to maximise the impact of the project.

I feel I was given a lot of responsibility during this year with it growing as I proved myself to the team, and by the end of this year I was given the role of project manager for a new project with support from my line manager.

I was very fortunate to receive a huge amount of support from both my line manager and also from the whole team. This was both through being with the team in the office most days and through one to one development sessions with my line manager every other week.

The culture was very positive with management not being detached from their staff and being very supportive. There is some current disparity between some staff due to the ongoing strike action but from what I have seen this is very limited and well managed.

I really enjoyed this year, it was an insight into an industry that I did not have a huge amount of knowledge on before starting but I feel that I have really learnt a lot around the complexities and the amount of development that goes on in the railway.

Yes

Do some research into what is currently going on in the business and around the ongoing changes that are happening.