HR Summer Intern Review

I very much enjoyed getting an in depth insight into how Barclays as a company works day to day, rather than just an insight day or two. We were given many opportunities to experience different areas of the business alongside our role to get an true understanding of the company as a whole. The tasks I was given were varied and the people were extremely nice which made for a very enjoyable 9 weeks at the firm, that went very quickly.

At first the tasks I was doing were not the most challenging but were still needed by the team so my team still valued the contributiosn I was making, and then as the internship progressed I was given more responsibilty to complete tasks for the team so I felt I was really adding value to the team by the end.

I had weekly catch up meetings with my manager to keep her updated on what I was doing, this provided a sufficient level of support and guidence on the work I was donig. However I was more supported by my day to day team and other colleagues for the smaller tasks so slight more contact and guidence on how I was doing would have been beneficial.

My days varied due to the nature of my role; some days we had events and so I barely stopped all day due to helping with logisitics, whereas other days I had a lot more time. In general after the second week I had a steady stream of work I could get on with to keep my busy from 9-5 with only a few days were I was struggling to fill my day. It also helped that if we had less work on some days we could go shadow others or have meetings with colleagues to find out more about the business.

At first my responsibilty levels were not that high as I was doing tasks that were needed for the team but weren't neccessarily too challenging. However by the end I was allowed to help run sessions and be responsible for projects with little oversight from my team which gave me a much higher level of responsibilty in the last few weeks.

I think the skills I learnt will be vital in the future; the work has really helped me expand my Excel and IT skills which will be helpful in my final year at university and my time managment and organisational skills have definitely improved. I also think the experience of learning how to work in a professional environment, running presentations and meetings, will be very useful for my future working career as I will be less nervous about doing it.

The office atmosphere was great, everyone was very chatty and willing to help no matter what team they came from which was very useful especially in the first few weeks. I was placed in a different building compared to most of my close peers which made my office slightly less social than others but everyone I did get to talk to was very welcoming. The only issue was my floor was very dark.

The intrnship was well organised with formalised work shadowing, learning sessions from all areas of the business and other intern networking events. We had recruiter catch ups which we knew about well in advance and we were given lots of time to set up our formal reviews. Towards the end there were more events that were sprung on us last minute but this was more due to trying to fit everything in anf rescheduling issues.

I feel Barclays haev invested heavily in us, we had two days of training in the first week and the learning continued throughout. Slight more investment in formalised training for our specific area would have been great but the training was still sufficient to help us learn as we went through the internship. All members of staff I met were also willing to give up their time to meet me or take their time to teach me something so colleagues were also heavily investing in our development.

Barclays has amazing opportunities for progression in the firm both laterally into different areas or via promotions, therefore the employment prospects are very good as they are a large company with lots to offer, including working abroad in New York and Singapore.

I already knew many interns on the scheme from my Spring week so my network was quite strong. This meant I could socailise easily with interns from all areas at drinks and other evetns. We didn't have loads of intern events therefore the socail scene could have been improved to make us feel like more of a close intern class, but we did organise our own dinners/drinks.

London is mroe expensive than most areas but we were given a living allowance of £2000 to help with renting if we lived outside of London.

I think there were opporunites to get invovled in sports teams outside of work, although I personally didn't. We also took part in a Citizenship Day and I volunteered to work in a retail branch one day so we could get involved in things outside of work but you had to try to seek most of them for yourself they weren't really advertised.