Insight Week Review

I really enjoyed the insight week as there were many opportunities to learn about the business and meet people who were all generally willing to help out and mentor younger colleagues. There is also a wealth of information and knowledge available for people who want to learn more about the financial industry.

No reward for employees.

Not much support in terms of guiding you to a specific area of the business.

Too short to actually gain meaningful skills.

The insight was extremely well structured by hr as every day was full of activities with lots of variety. Perhaps the only problem was that they were too ambitious in trying to fit too much in to the short amount of time that we had which meant that we had very little time for breaks in between activities.

Lots of interesting people.

The company clearly wanted to invest a lot of time and resources into junior people as we had many speakers from senior parts of the business. There were also many training resources available for us to learn more about the business and the financial industry which will be helpful for the future.

Being able to talk to people from the company definitely helped me to understand what it would be like to have a full time role with the company and I was able to ask any questions I had. However I did not actually do any real work so maybe if this could be incorporated into the programme then this would be an improvement.

Again being able to talk to people from all areas of the business and ask questions helped me to understand the company culture. Furthermore just being in the building and around people from the business, I was able to gain a lot of insight into the day-to-day life of employees working there full-time.

The content of day was very informative about different areas of the business so it was extremely valuable in helping me to decide on my future career path. Learning more about the different areas definitely helped me to identify which areas I think I will be most suited to and will most enjoy working in.

I was not paid because this was only a week long experience which was expected. I was also reimbursed my train fare to and from London which seems to be the standard for events like this. There were also free lunches provided which were very delicious and an unexpected bonus for the event.

There were quite a few opportunities for network and meeting other employees of the company set up by hr such as during lunch and in the evenings. I would have liked a greater range of people speaking though because the proportion of people from the business to people on the insight week was too low.

Although there were quite a few opportunities to meet employees of the company, one of the problems was that the proportion of people from the business to people on the insight week was too low so there would often be lots of people crowding around a person from the business to get a chance to talk.

Talking to employees from the business did help me to get an idea of the activities that employees can get involved in outside of work despite the long hours that they work. For example there seemed to be lots of team building events as one person even described to me a time when they went to play drums!

This was definitely a good opportunity to be able to talk to people from the business, but I did not learn that much new stuff and of the knowledge that I did gain, probably nearly all of it I could have gained from reading about the industry. Therefore the insight did not offer any unique features to attract people.