Marketing Analyst Review

Overall I didn’t enjoy the placement, there just wasn’t enough work to do and that led to long and boring days sat in the office. The placement was never marketed as in the B2B team and I had foolishly thought it was in consumer marketing which I would of much preferred. Some of the HR team were disorganised and often extremely awkward to talk to. During the one-year I was at AmEx the placement students went through 3 different sets of HR personnel. It hardly filled the students with confidence in the scheme if even the HR staff are leaving. The HR team was good at trying to impress the summer interns but once the summer interns left contact with HR went down to almost 0 until just before the end of the placement. They also pretended to many of the students that there were graduate job offers available when in-fact there were only offers available to finance placement students. However, I must say the most enjoyable part of the placement was meeting some fantastic people who are really talented individuals, they made the placement bearable.

American Express has some fantastic staff and the majority of the time I felt valued by the teams I interacted with. However, there were a number of times when I was given jobs that I found demeaning or found that simply some staff were too lazy to complete the tasks themselves so gave them to me. It’s much easier for someone to ask the intern to do a job rather than spend 5 minutes searching themselves and I found this happened too regularly with some staff members. Having said this most people were appreciative of my work and fun to work alongside.

My manager was absolutely fantastic and extremely supportive. She would happily take time out of her day to explain things to me and when giving me tasks she would ensure I understood them fully before completing them. The rest of the team, who often provided work for me to do, were also very supportive. However, I found my Director to be extremely rude and unsupportive. On walking into the office she would ignore the entire the team, at times it was weeks before we even spoke despite her sitting a few meters from me, she would ignore emails and cancel meetings at short notice. She seemed fixated on having the most pointless tasks 100% perfect which was a waste of my and the teams time.

Throughout the year my tasks varied dramatically. Unfortunately there were far too many times when I had literally nothing to do. Yet during some projects the workload would be non-stop as you were trying to reach a deadline for a communication to go out to customers. However, I would say, averaged over the whole year I probably only ever reached 50/60% capacity, making for a very boring placement. Despite making it clear that I had no work to do my Director did not want to share me with wider teams. I know the restructuring of the company was a big part in the reduced workload but even so there was always a team that could have used some assistance.

At times I was given a huge amount of responsibility. During my managers holiday I was left in charge of projects and had to manage all the various stakeholder relationships and ensure the project progressed. Most of the time though my projects would be checked via weekly meetings with my manager which is to be expected. As I didn’t have much work to do the majority of the time there was limited responsibility.

I learnt a lot during my time at AmEx and I am in no doubt that the office skills I have learnt will be beneficial in the graduate job I proceed into. The placement has shown me marketing in practice and the challenges faced by a global company in delivering marketing materials to clients.

The average employee age at American Express is 38. Although this isn't an issue it does mean if you are a placement student everyone is considerably older than you and perhaps doesn't have as much in common with you as other large companies such as Microsoft who take on 100s of students. In my year, Amex took on 9 placement students, 2 situated in Brighton. The office has a good atmosphere though and people were always happy to have a chat with you throughout the day or were happy for you to put headphones in and listen to music. It was very laid back and relaxed.

The placement started off well organised but seemed to get worse as it went on. There were trips during the first 10 weeks whilst the summer interns were there including to the London Eye, a treasure hunt and private bowling. HR had also organised Senior Leaders to come in and speak to the interns regarding their business area during the first 10 weeks. After this period though I didn't really hear from them until the end of placement.

I was able to go to various conferences and HR did place us on Excel training and Presentation training.

The graduate scheme was not appealing and very messily put together, it included the basic fundamental training you need to complete in your job, it was no different to doing a proper job at AmEx. AmEx need to seriously improve the scheme compared to the other major players if they really want to attract the best talent.

Some of the other interns did go out in London occasionally but there was no real social scene. A lot of people commuted in so going out was difficult. When the summer interns were there everyone went out more and HR had organised events for all of us.

It was London so really expensive.

There isn't much around Victoria but everywhere is only a short tube drive away.

There were some charity runs and you could help volunteer at events such as the Brighton marathon which AmEx sponsor. Overall not a lot though but that goes with the nature of the workforce being older.