Summer Analyst in Private Wealth Review

The work was not stimulating, very administrative, at Banker level it seems great but not a stimulating place to start. Training was high level, not enough tangible new skills picked up. Experience was very much down to your team so if you had a bad manager, then had a terrible time.

Not at all. Little to no interaction in my team, most communication by email even if you were in the same rule. Unclear instructions and feedback (e.g. my manager asked to do more work for other bankers, and I had already approached other bankers but they had been told by him not to give me any work).

In 10 weeks I had 4 meetings, despite insisting on a daily basis, emailing status reports, putting time in the calendar. All meetings would be cancelled. Feedback was often requested but not given. We were supposed to write our own objectives for what we wanted out of the internship, but mine were written for me by my manager as a list of things he hadn't got round to, like tidying his client portfolios and compliance. He was also rude. Although HR offered help they were ineffective in meetings, agreeing completely with line managers even contradicting original statements they had made to the intern class. I also had personal difficulties, and was told there was support for these but it was never given to me. Instead it was embarrassing and I didn't feel it had been kept confidential.

I had plenty of work to do, but largely it was extremely boring and something that I would expect to be doing were I a PA or in compliance. A lot of the work was also to do with the terrible systems not being aligned, so manually copying information from one system to another.

Although I insisted on ownership of one project, I was given the work of making my manager compliant, checking through everything he had failed to do with his clients.

Most of the skills I used here I already had. New skills were mainly individual to the firm and non transferable so a complete waste of time as I would never want to work there.

The complete opposite of a comfortable, enjoyable and supportive team environment. Little to no interaction, everyone kept to themselves and there was some back stabbing in terms of stealing clients.

While the HR side was very well organised (training, talks), there was almost no communication between HR and line managers. Also as my offices were not in the main site (I was in the high net worth group), I had to spend a lot of time travelling between Mayfair and Canary Wharf, and although these meetings were compulsory, I would get stick from my manager.

It aimed to invest a good amount, in line with other similar internships, many of these I already had and were very high level. I didn't learn many tangible things.

Maybe in the future coming in as an experienced hire and in another area of the bank not HNW.

I organised many of the events, only about a third would make it to much.

Very expensive

hardly anything

A couple of networking sessions.