Purchasing and Procurement Analyst Review

The work was really mundane - I wasn't given my first choice department and despite working hard over summer, I didn't receive a graduate offer. My expectations of this placement were totally different - I thought I would be a lot more valued.

Despite showing a lot of enthusiasm and wanting to get stuck into my projects, I was treated coldly by most of the people in my team, and my manager was not in the office most of the time. Hardly anyone replied to my emails either, whenever I used to ask for help.

Most of the time, my supervisor was not in the office. He was away on meetings and conferences and hardly ever responded to my emails asking for help. I had to learn about all the business processes on my own by talking to people, and was never formally inducted.

Most days were quite boring as I didn't get much work to do. I had to request for extra work, and most of the time I was turned away. I couldn't look like I was wasting time, so I had to resort to stretching out simple pieces of work throughout the entire day.

I was asked to put together some spreadsheets and powerpoints, for archiving purposes. None of my work was critical to the business, or ever showed to anyone besides my team and immediate manager.

I learnt about purchasing and supply by watching others at work, pestering them to tell me about what they were doing, and doing some research through the intranet system. At least this will be useful for me in the future, as I can mention this to other employers.

The atmosphere was quite busy - people were on the phone most of the time, shouting to each other over desks and involved in their own work. Most people ate lunch at their desks and it was rare to see someone taking a break in the kitchen.

A lot of effort from HR went into setting up the placement, and there was a clear structure to the assessment system which required us to have a project, set suitable milestones and continually be assessed by our supervisors. Unfortunately, my manager and my team were the least bothered by this.

Apart from a lot of material that I had to hunt for myself, through the intranet, the only training came from HR. There were some presentation skills work-shops, undergraduate drop-ins, CV discussions and interview-skills sessions.

The FMCG industry is a very dynamic and constantly evolving environment, with exciting prospects coming up in the future. However, in my department, this was not the case. I imagine the graduate programme would be highly beneficial to students for training purposes.

Quite a lot of the interns wanted to socialise and we always managed to get a group together every other evening or so to do go out somewhere. There was a good mix of students who wanted to do everything from drinking and clubbing to having a picnic and visiting a petting zoo.

Costs were fairly average, depending on what was on our agenda. A long night out over many places would end up costing around £30-40 including drinks, whereas a quiet night out to the pub could easily be less than a fiver. I was commuting from home, so I didn't have to worry about living costs.

The nightlife was quite poor and we often had to go to surrounding places such as London, Guildford, Reading to have good nights out. This is why costs for a decent night out stacked up so quickly.

There were training and development programmes available due to courtesy of HR department, but other than that there was absolutely nothing else to get involved in. Any extra-curricular activities would have to be approved by our managers, and from what I heard, no one got any approvals.