Software Engineer Associate Review

The placement was a great opportunity. This is because I was able to take part in a number of projects and roles across Accenture gaining a tremendous amount of skills. I was also able to travel which was a phenomenal experience. There were also many training opportunities and fun social events and societies to participate in.

I felt as though some colleagues really valued me upon the team, in one of the projects and invested a lot of time in giving me useful challenging tasks. Where as on another project some of the colleagues treated you like you were not going to be useful without even looking at what skills you had, which at times was frustrating and discriminating based on your level not to mention unfair.

For 6 months I worked on a project in Newcastle, the manager always gave me challenging useful tasks that would in turn help the team and the overall company. Accenture makes sure employees set up goals so that as an employee we can always try to improve our skills and level up. The goals and objectives are supported by them giving us a career councilor to monitor and provide us with support.

It is very hard to say because sometimes I was extremely busy and at some times I did not have much to do. It would have been nice to know what work I was going to do all the time rather than coming in and being told I would have nothing to do or would be very busy.

I was involved on creating scripts to be run on the back end of live servers. I was also involved in updating records which were very risky tasks and so to be trusted with the tasks was very important but scary. I was also involved in developing scripts to provide technical evidence to support future sale propositions at Accenture which was one of my best achievements.

Working on the back end for 6 months allowed me to practice my database and server skills which allowed me to become a stronger programmer. One of my roles involved being a network application designer. This involved a lot of network concepts which also helped me in gaining a great understanding in network computing for network computing module at University.

It was very relaxed and calm people would smile and always take up a opportunity to bring cakes in to work. We also had casual Fridays where we could wear jeans in to work rather than work suits. The desk spaces were hot desk so it was very formal but almost reminded me of the labs at university with individual computers however with a great view of London.

The set up was not really organised at the beginning, since I was called up on my summer holiday to Canada to send over documents when I was given the role in January. When we started they waited till two days prior to the event to tell us where we would need to go. However after that it was quite good they put us in training teams, trained us up and then assigned us to roles.

The company had loads of training for business modules to programming modules. They were mostly in London. They also had training which you could access online through their training portal which was convenient when you needed information in a hurry. On the projects they offered what they call brown bags where the SMEs of the business who are people who know a lot about the business would transfer their skills to us.

I was offered a job when I finished my placement. They even allowed me to take up to one year where I could do what ever I want, for instance take out a masters. They would then allow you to come back when you finish. The great thing is when you sign on they give you a £5k signing bonus.

All of the fellow placement students were very kind and we all got along. We got to go to placement dinners just for all of the interns, which was then paid by the company. I even ended up making a group of very close friends that I communicate with still today.

Travelling to London was very expensive in terms of the train ticket and having to eat out for lunch. However when it came to working out of London for example Newbury of Newcastle the company paid for the living and eating out which was great.

I don't really party out, however I was told that the nightlife in Newcastle was amazing they had many clubs that you would see on the MTV show Jersey shore. The streets are always alive with people having hen nights. There are loads of students in Newcastle as well so you will probably have lots of fun.

The project I worked on in Newcastle allowed you to win tickets to watch the football games every week at the stadium, I even knew a few colleagues that had won tickets quite often. They had weekly yoga nights and football games that you could participate in which most of the people on the project went to.