DB2 ADMIN Analyst/Graduate Programme adminstrator Review

I loved my placement year it was such an eye opener into what it could be work for a big company. There were around 300 other placement students at IBM, which made it very sociable and made some great friends.

My team were valued my help. However, they were mainly international that lead to not meeting a majority of them.

IBM have great support behind each intern. They provide you with a task manager that will give you all the jobs they want doing, and are very approachable. You are also provided a Professional Development Manager who looks after you, and you go to if you have any issues with your job role or anything. I had an issue with my first role, and due to my PDM I was quickly given a secondary role to make sure I had the full experience. They also provided plenty of workshops that help you improve your presentation skills and learn how to do assessment days properly.

I first worked in DB2 support, which was up and down with the amount of work. One day it could be very busy the next it wouldn't. Thus, I had to got another role within the graduate scheme that boosted my workload and was able to stay busy.

Plenty of responsibility is given to you at IBM. I was able to create reports that allowed managers to make decisions on where they will go in the future, create a website for all new graduates to start IBM and Starter packs/ learning material for new graduates, which require a lot of trust,

This experience helped my soft skills tenfold with being able to present, be professional and network with people. However, hard skills I can't say I developed them any further.

There are plenty of offices to go around in IBM, but generally the atmosphere was fun with the other students. I would however say that some offices are more fun then the other and that out of hours is very sociable.

Foundation, part of the business that looked after us, was very good at setting up everything. Regularly events were sorted for meeting people and for work shops.

This is a hard one as manager wise they let you get on with it and don't give you much development (depending who your manager is of course). Foundation however do help and they put on some very useful workshops but these spanned once every 3 months.

Very appealing plenty of room to grow. However, you have to reapply back to get into their graduate scheme and even after working a year for them you don't get any additional perks.

Very social, always someone organising something. Meet and made some very good friends.

I lived at home, but what I know of London and Feltham area very expensive. They also have many office so Feltham was mid-range while southbank was expensive.

London, Kingston great nightlife.

Going out to socialise was good, but activities there were few, and due to the size of the company its hard to find out.