Industrial placement student Review

Most of teh workload I really enjoyed and found quite interesting. For some of the year I felt like the work I was doing didbn't challenge me mentally enough so wasn't always very enjoyable. I learnt a lot from it all though and even if I didn't love every minute I still enjoy what I get to take from this year.

Within store you really feel like part of the family and everyone seems to value your ideas and what you bring to the team. The office staff are really friendly an dhelp a lot when you are working in the regional office. Between these times it can sometimes feel a bit lonely an you do need to fight a bit to prove your worth to many of the area managers you work with.

Most of teh year we were our own bosses in a lot of ways. We were given what teh finishing outcome needed to be but teh rest of it was down to us. Despite this I felt like Directors doors were always open if I needed any sort of help at all and the store managers and staff were always more than happy to lend a hand if needs be.

This varied a lot. Some days too busy, some days not enough and others were just right. i depended a lot on what project you were working on as well as how busy the store was. It was usually easy to find more work to do if you needed it but some members of staff would load too much onto you with too short of a deadline and wouldn't understand that you had your own work too.

We were given loads of responsibility both in our instore training and during our project work out of store. Although directors kept an ete on our work as a whole we were able to make decisions on our day to day role as well as some decisions that would make a big change to the company and it's operations.

I have learnt so much this year that will help me. It's my first real experience of professional work so getting the opportunities to work directly with directors as well as orther levels of management has been very valuable to my development in business. I have expanded many skills including organisation, communication and time keeping to name a few.

Between the IP's and the staff in regional office and in the stores the relationship is very nice and family like. Sometimes there has been tension between IP's and Area managers due to confusions between responsibilities and positions within the company but directors have always had their doors open if help is needed.

There was a lot of initial confusion as no-one really knew who was in charge of us and what our role really entailed. We relied a lot on the store managers to run our training and decide what would be valuable for us to learn at the start. The communication within the organisation isn't great and it did often cause confusion for us.

Aldi invest a lot into us as it trains us similarly to the graduates with the aim of all of us ending up on the graduate scheme. If you pushed for your training in store then they would give you 100%, however it was down to you to ensure you recieved all appropriate training, no one will chase you for it.

If you would like to be an area manager for aldi then as long as you perform well throughout the year, there is no reason why they would not ask you to return. However the chain of promotion is short, therefore once you have beomce a director, there are few areas to progress from there.

During store time due to the fact that all IP's were on different shifts it was difficult to coordinate any social gatherings. However this did improve during the head office time as we all had weekend off. In the swindon region we were all able to live together therefore the social scene was a bit better as we could organise things easily.

In swindon the housing was quite reasonable, however you needed to be careful of what areas you chose to live in. The price of socalising I would say was average to most areas. Futhermore there is a shopping outlset in swindon which was reasonably priced.

This is quite irrelevent to the Aldi placement. THis is not teh sort of placement you go on if you are looking for good nights out. The opportunities you are given and the things you learn this year are too good to waste or miss out on. To work for Aldi you need to be willing to give 100% and put yourslef and your learning first.

As we all lived together in the Swindon region we spent most evenings with at least one other placement student so getting involved in activities for our region was quite easy. At the start of the year we were all working different shifts so didn't get to see each other as much making organising these activities quite hard.