Infrastructure Integration Assistant UKI Review

I have thoroughly enjoyed my placement year at IBM. I feel that the opportunities I have been given, the different projects I've been involved with and the variety of people that I have met will highly benefit me when it comes to a graduate career. Coming from never having worked in a business before to how confident I am now is a real achievement.

I felt valued by my colleagues during my placement year. The work that I was doing felt to be useful to the team as a whole, and I really felt needed throughout. I was always thanked when carrying out an important task, or going above and beyond to ensure that my work was delivered to the highest quality. I always felt appreciated.

I was given continuous support by my manager throughout the year. My manager would always book regular meetings with me to check I was getting on okay, and had enough work - and if I didn't, would find me more in my areas of interest. The guidance offered to my during my placement was outstanding, IBM offers an entirely separate manager tailored just to monitoring your progress and to track you as you enhance.

I believe that I had a very lucky year for my placement. As soon as I started, everything in the Telecoms area was changing and re-structuring. This meant a lot of on-going projects to get involved in. I had so much opportunity to travel, and co-host various events around the country. This was such an experience for a placement year and enabled me to choose what I wanted from a graduate role.

I was given a lot more responsibility in my role that I had ever imagined before starting. My partner and I would often attend events alone, with no management - and have a large influence on decisions made on processes involving the whole of UK and Ireland. During the year I felt that I had a lot of say on the decisions I made on a day to day basis, and management would always take my opinion into consideration.

I can't begin to explain how much this placement will help me in my future career. Being in the working world for a year has allowed me to build my confidence entirely, prove myself and enhance my skills in so many areas - numerical, organisational, teamwork, adaptability and many more. Having been in a large company for a year has given me a totally different view of business and the way it works - so much so, that I now know what I want to do when I graduate. This experience has enabled me to see how a business works from the inside, meaning I can fully understand how it works and match my degree skills to a real life situation.

I think that my placement fell on a bad year for my location. A lot of the office was being closed down, and most of the employees worked from home. I felt like this gave my office bad morale for who was in, and meant that it was never very busy - and the social activities were not too regular.

I think the placement was very well organised, mostly because IBM have been taking placements for so many years - 350 at a time. There was a two day training period which helped everyone to get settled in before starting work. I knew exactly what was happening before starting and wasn't confused by the process.

I think that my role is one where there is not much training available. But I have learned so much so far. I think that IBM are very good at monitoring personal development, always ensuring you are setting goals and meeting them at regular intervals. So, I suppose in that respect - they invested a lot of time in ensuring I was getting out of the year exactly what I wanted.

The thing with placement to graduate at IBM is that is changes significantly. Placement roles are all internal, mine specifically - improving processes for employees and ensuring requirements are consistently met. When it moves to graduate roles, they are all client facing - moving around.. going from project to project, selling, advising, consulting. Luckily, I am very interested in this after my placement year, but if you weren't - I don't think there's much opportunity for anything else.

Again, as mentioned earlier - I think that my placement fell on a bad year for my location. However, it is good that there are always a few other students at each location so your never going to be the only one struggling at the start. I think the social scene is as good as you make it - if you can get together with the other students once a week, you could create a social scene for your location.

Being from around London, I find my location at Portsmouth very cheap. Rent is much cheaper being a student area, socialising is also on the cheaper side. So rent is probably around £300-350 and for a night out you'd be looking at a few pounds a drink.

I think Portsmouth has a good nightlife. However, it is very student orientated, if that's something that doesn't bother you once you start working then you'd really enjoy it. Always busy which is good.

I know that IBM runs sports clubs that students can join, however I have not participated in these personally so can't comment.