Events & Portfolio Intern Review

My role sits within the Professional Products Division, where my team and I organise a variety of industry events, including the division’s flagship – the L’Oréal Colour Trophy. The longest running live hairdressing competition in the world, I help with all logistical, creative, and organisational aspects of the event. My role includes: liaising with suppliers and hair artists, managing all payments, our website and promotional (social media) strategy (creating, executing and performance tracking), booking travel/accommodation, ordering collateral for events, briefing internal teams, as well as providing versatile support for the Events & Portfolio and wider team.

I have definitely improved my communication skills, written but particularly verbal. It's incredibly fast-paced and you need to know what's happening for lots of different projects within a split second and be able to switch between. Being able to multi-task with accuracy and clarity at all times. Stakeholder Management. Overall confidence, particularly when presenting and in an office environment.

LOTS. We are a very small and mighty team and throughout the year I (hopefully!) feel like I built up trust to take on bigger and bigger jobs. We all muck in to get an event over the line but I definitely felt really privileged to take on certain jobs like posting social content and making production calls/decisions.

I have felt so supported throughout the year. We sit in a very small team that sits under a group of other really small teams, 2 sets of networks you can rely on for support. My close team it started off with a weekly 1-1 but as it gets closer to events it becomes pretty constant. Within the larger team we meet every month so you really get to know everyone despite your jobs/roles not being similar at all. HR, particularly at the beginning, were super hands on and really made me feel settled as quickly as they could at a massive company like L'Oréal.

You definitely have to be the right character fit, if you really like doing things in the evenings and weekends it might not be perfect for you, but the culture is so friendly and pretty much family-like because of all the time you spend together - it's only for a year so in my opinion totally worth it for the experience to meet some amazing people and work on some insane projects. With so many interns on the floor and in the whole building it basically is like being in uni again, so you never feel out of place.

I have LOVED it! Would 10/10 recommend. It's incredibly long hours, sometimes for protracted periods of time but if you're committed you will have the best time. It's definitely work hard play hard situation. I have had the opportunity to get involved with Mental Health Awareness Week, Pride and Neurodiversity activations and I would really recommend so you can meet people across the business and if it's something you're interested in.

Yes

When applying, try to forget that you're applying to L'Oréal until the end of your planning. You think L'Oréal you think beauty, luxury etc. which is all true, but no matter how fancy an event is, there's still call sheets that need to be made, products to order, travel to book (basically the not-so-fun tasks). I think the team will always look for a practical, logistical person over anything else, so just focus on it being an events role like any other.