RFS Manager Review

I really enjoyed my placement with IBM. I got to meet fantastic people. The culture is amazing as I was given the choice of working from home on Mondays and Fridays. The learning opportunities are also very good, they have a huge education program with personalized learning that gives you targeted and relevant lessons.

I play an important role in facilitating conversations between client and IBM teams. The benefit of having this role is that you become a go-to person that is likely to know in which direction to point for specific information. Also, you do not truly realize how valued you are until you go on holiday for a week or so and come back to a mess and people desperately happy to have you back.

I was fortunate enough to have the person I was replacing stay on for a few more weeks. This meant I had a handover period where he taught me everything I need to know. Not just the simple tasks but more importantly the values and expected standards to uphold. Now I have learned to execute my tasks so fast and well that I do not need much guidance and barely have to interact with my manager. I love the independence and trust I am given.

It depends on the time of year. I work in a team of 3. There are times where we could have done with 5 team members (especially around early summer, early new year and quarter ends) and times where we could have done with 1 (Christmas/new year time or Easter).

This is something that you need to earn. The more trust and confidence your managers place in you and the more responsibility. This incorporates trust in executing your daily tasks, trust in interacting with clients and trust with common sense. If you get to a point where you are autonomous enough that you barely interact with your manager, you know that he trusts you completely and that you are doing a great job. Be cautious though because one mistake can break the pyramid and you are almost back to zero.

As a student, you get 4 months of summer holidays, 1 month at christmas and 1 month at easter. That leaves you with 6 months on campus where you have 12 hours of class per week and if you are one of the unlucky ones you get that one 9AM lecture. Here you have 25 days of holiday for an entire 365 day cycle and you work from 9 to 5 minimum. If you carry that onto uni, you will become the best undergraduate of all.

The atmosphere in my office is a little different than most placement students. I work on a client site. This means that you need to be well dressed, well groomed, polite and patient in any client interaction no matter how angry a client can be. The best part though is that I get the choice to decide whether I want to come in the office on Mondays and Fridays.

The Placement scheme is extremely well structured. It is definitely one of the best on the market. They have an entire division ("Foundation") that takes care of summer interns, placement students, Apprentices and Graduates. They make sure to throw as many events as they can for everyone to develop themselves or meet new people. I highly recommend IBM for this scheme.

The firm is very invested in developing its employees. IBM will likely pay for travel expenses including overnight stay so that its employees may attend self development sessions. In addition to that. IBM recently launched a program called Think40 that encourages its employees to undertake 40 hours of learning in a year.

The company is so big and has so many different divisions that the opportunities are endless. You can easily switch to something different if you do not like what you are doing. You can shadow people, you can find coaches that volunteer to teach you, you can find insight days too.