Commercial Intern - Consumer Products Review

L'Oreal is a great place to get a first experience of the corporate world. There is a very good balance between giving you time to settle and quickly giving you very real responsibilities. Subsequently it is not long before you feel like a valued employee at the company. There are loads of very nice people who can always make time for you and help you out with any issues you might have.

I took complete ownership of my own project from the very beginning, which turned out to be very important to my team and wider people in the company. Almost every day someone told me that they were impressed with my work and thanked me for what I was doing. I felt very valued by my team as well as some very senior people in my division.

My division was going through a large restructuring at the time of my placement, so everyone was quite busy for a lot of the time. Subsequently there were several occasions when no-one could help me out, and I had to go about finding longer solutions myself. While sometimes difficult, this did actually help develop my skills in independent problem-solving.

I could tell that I was less busy than most of the other interns, because my work was very project based and independent. That meant I set my own deadlines and was rarely put under pressure by others to complete tasks. While this was obviously beneficial in terms of stress, it meant that I was rarely motivated by anything other than my own desire to complete the project.

I took complete ownership over my project, which was an important commercial development for the company. However, I was not really given any day-to-day responsibilities. There was a year-long placement intern in my team, and most of the regular responsibilities went to her. For the beginning of the placement this did give me a slight feeling of being a bit detached from the team, but this did not last very long.

Learning about the regular processes of a large corporation is invaluable, and commercial awareness is very helpful and looks great on a CV. On a more specific level I went from being very basic to being quite advanced in Microsoft Excel, and have evidence to show that I have skills in project management as well as team work.

The L'Oreal offices have a great atmosphere - there's nobody you can't talk to. While people do get their heads down and complete their work there's always time for conversation, and no-one judges you for getting up and heading over to talk to a friend of yours on the other side of the floor. The more senior employees are in the same area, and regularly walk around speaking to people, and not just about business. There's always a buzz of conversation, and someone to talk to.

The L'Oreal 10-week summer internship is planned in great detail - we all had specific sessions that we attended over the course of the placement to teach us about various different aspects of the company. They also have a great progress and review system in place to track your development over your time there, which is great because it really feels as though the company wants to help you. There was never a time I didn't know what I was supposed to be doing or where I was expected to be - it was organised meticulously.

L'Oreal has a very good e-learning platform that we all had access to. Some of the training sessions were compulsory, and there was a huge amount that was optional but highly useful. Some of the ones we completed were on public speaking, business ethics and competition law. I learned at one point that it was actually quite expensive to give each person access to the e-learning, so they really had invested quite a lot. Even if the skills we acquired wouldn't be directly used in our time at L'Oreal, they were very useful skills for anyone to have. In this sense, it really felt as though the company wanted to help us grow as professionals, even if we wouldn't end up working there.

Naturally it depends on the preferences of the individual. If you are interested in the world of FMCG, L'Oreal is a fantastic place to build a career. From the management trainee scheme you go straight into a good level role, and there is room to work up. It's an environment that appreciates a vast variety of skills, and the people I spoke to came from a huge range of degree disciplines, from theater to biochemistry. I would imagine that, further along the line, some people might hit a ceiling if they didn't have some sort of experience/qualification in business or the like, but L'Oreal provides opportunities for exposure and training, so there are always ways to move up.

There were a huge number of interns in the building - combining the summer placements and the 12-month placements I think there were about 120 interns. There was even an intern committee hired at the beginning, whose job it was to organise social events. We had some sort of social every week, whether it was just going to the pub after work, a night out (often subsidised), or a game of rounders in Hyde Park. L'Oreal is an amazing environment to meet like-minded people, and even if my career doesn't follow a path in the industry, I know that my social experiences at the company will keep me in touch with some of the great people I met there.

London is expensive - there is no getting around it. The office itself is in Hammersmith, which as far as areas go isn't one of the cheaper ones, but I know a lot of interns who got very good deals on their accommodation. I lived in my uni flat in Islington, which costs me £145 per week, and I know that most people paid less than that but lived under 10 minutes walk from the office. Socialising can be expensive as well - the nicer clubs and venues in London often charge £8-£9 for a cocktail, but there were several events at nice places which were organised by our committee, and most of the time there was a big group deal that got us all cheap or even free drinks and entry.

It's London. It might be expensive, but it has the best nightlife in the country. There's a huge range of places to go - pubs, conventional clubs, rooftop bars with views of the city, even bars based on ping-pong or board games. There isn't much to say about it - it's the capital city, and the nightlife is unbeatable.

Yes! Even if you didn't want to go out and organise things yourself, there were multiple sports teams at L'Oreal that we could get involved in. We played 5-a-side football in a local league with people outside work for one thing. As I go to university in London, I had other people to see and things to do away from my colleagues, but the vast majority of people moved from far away, and they never seemed stuck for things to do!