Sales Intern Review

I would say that I thoroughly enjoyed the internship as a whole. It was fairly challenging at times, however, this was an added impetus to think on my feet and enjoy the task. In addition to this, there was a good split in terms of tasks throughout the internship. This was important as it meant that I wasn't doing any one thing for such a period of time that it became tedious.

Again, I felt that the community at pladis were extremely responsive and helpful throughout the internship at a variety of levels of responsibility. During the internship I had a variety of different contacts at the company including line-managers, project supervisors and 'buddies'. These people were very readily contactable, friendly and approachable.

As previously said, the supervisors and line managers were extremely approachable and more than willing to help with any problems that I may have had. This was most evident in the presentation area of the internship where their advice was invaluable in an area that we were by no means specialists in.

As the job was largely conducted on my own out in the field, how I structured my days was largely at my own discretion. We were given guidelines of roughly how much we were expected to be doing each day/week and this allowed me to plan my locations and targets for each day. During the presentation aspect of the internship we were also left to our own devices with regards to how and where we conducted our research and this challenged us to allocate our time effectively.

One of the key benefits to working for pladis is the amount of responsibility and freedom that you are given - especially with regards to making your own schedule. By no means to they hold your hand throughout the internship, however, should you need help with anything, you are encouraged to ask and there is a fantastic system of support from both colleagues and managers alike.

One of the key skills that I developed throughout the internship was my time management. This is a skill that had been particularly useful in my degree studies with regards to how I am managing time between different projects and assignments. I also heavily developed my ability to present effectively to a relatively large amount of people - this skill in particular will prove invaluable moving forwards.

I did not spend that much time in the office as part of my internship as I was largely in a field-based role, however, the time that I did spend in the office was thoroughly enjoyable. There was an extremely warm and welcoming atmosphere that engendered an extremely friendly but simultaneously effective office environment.

The organisation of the internship is one of the key strengths here. The entire process was amazingly well planned out (especially considering that this was the first year that the internship had been running). As an intern, I was never without a task and when we were moving on to a new part of the job, there would be training periods in between that made us excellently prepared for the next part of the internship.

The overall investment from the company was vast in my opinion. The idea of the internship from their perspective was largely that they were investing in their future and this seemed to be something that they took extremely seriously. They poured a great deal of time, money and effort into the experience for us and the professionalism of the internship as a whole definitely reflected this.

I was fortunate enough to procure a job with pladis and I am very much looking forward to starting my career with them in September. As a company the prospects of working at a company such as this one are extremely appealing. Everyone that I worked with there was incredibly friendly, the advancement opportunities are fantastic and the work is stimulating as well.

My fellow placement students were extremely friendly and, despite not working with them every single day, we maintained a good relationship and would often talk as well as socialising in the periods when we would come together as a team for training weeks or presentations etc. back at head office.

As I was working largely from home, the cost of living and socialising was not any different to what I am used to. With regards to travel, my company car and petrol was all paid for by expenses so this came as no extra cost to myself.

Again, I was working from home so there was no real change here.

We did engage in a charity day which was both fun and enriching,