International CRM Marketing Intern Review

My placement was incredibly enjoyable and the year went incredibly quickly. I was able to get a true understanding of not only the world place and the world of work, but also a meaningful insight into the department I was in, as I had never previously worked in this area before.

Responsibility was given to me from the onset of when I joined. Through this, I felt incredibly valued by every person I interacted with within the workplace. There was very little, if no times, that I actually felt like an intern, due to the amount of responsibility I held and how much people depended on me and the work I completed.

My manager was very hands on and approachable, which made it very easy for me to ask questions, especially at the beginning of my placement when I was getting use to the role. As well as this, he also left me to my own devices, which allowed me to gain more confidence and responsibility through my work.

My workload differed from day to day, as this depended on the time of year and what projects were running. Some days were more full-on than others and time flew by, other days I had little to do, due to waiting on other people to complete their work before sending to me, so I could complete mine. At times, I would’ve enjoyed to have more work to pass the time.

At the beginning, I was getting use to my role, so I use to assist my manager with many of the projects. As time went on, I picked up more responsibility from my manager, which then ended in me taking sole responsibility for managing the process for each of the projects and ensuring that they were completed on time. This included attending and contributing in many meetings with higher up individuals in the business and ensuring that I passed on any important points to my manager.

I gained a large amount of confidence, which will help and enable me to talk in front of larger groups during any lectures or group sessions. In addition to this, this placement year has swayed my decision in the options I selected for my final year. I will have background knowledge and a working insight into the module, which will hopefully, in return, work to my benefit.

As everyone in the office has such a large workload, people do not really interact with each other much. The office can be incredibly quiet and boring at times which can really dampen the mood of the day and make the day seem much longer. I would say this had a small impact on me deciding against applying for the MT scheme.

I would say the placement was fairly organised. However, HR expected you to complete a number of things, for example, company appraisals at the beginning of the year, in addition to booking onto these in-store discovery days, without informing you of when and where you can get this information from. They would just send you chaser emails when you had no idea in the first place of how to complete this.

I had no additional training or support to enable me to further develop into my role. This is one thing that I feel would’ve been additional, even if the events I attended were free. As I was completely new to the role and had no previous experience, it would’ve been nice to have training into certain areas to further deepen my understanding and broaden my knowledge and skillset.

With regards to future employment, the next step would be the MT scheme, however this did not appeal to me. The MT scheme requires you to rotate around three pre-set areas in the business that fall into one category. Personally, through hearing the roles (and stress) that was related to one department in particular, which would be a part of the category I would apply for, put me off of the scheme. The other rotations did not appeal to me either, as they were in parts of the business that was of no interest to me.

I would say that a large majority of the social scene was between the interns, as opposed to mixing with other employees in the business. At the beginning of the year, more of the interns would get involved in the social outings, but as the year progressed, people use to drop out and the number of people who went out went from 20 to 5.

I lived at home, so my cost of living was drastically reduced, however as I lived far from the workplace, this increased my monthly cost of travel. I live and work in London, so the socialising aspect was expensive, especially seeing as my wage is that extensive, this included after work and at the weekends.

I worked in Croydon, so the nightlife was pretty low and no one after work would really venture into town. A few months into starting my placement, a Boxpark was built and this added to the nightlife. Boxpark is close to the station and my workplace and it offered a really good range of food and drink places.

There were no activities to get involved in after work. Many of the employees stuck to themselves and went straight home after work. On a couple of occasions, work held some ‘socials’ for the employees to attend within the office for a couple of hours. As well as this, during ‘Wellness Week’ they held a free yoga class on one of the office floors, however this only occurred once.