Consumer Healthcare global internal communications Review

The second half of my placement, I really enjoyed. The first half, not so much. This was more to do with our team structure at the time so I didn’t get as much work. However, as I got more work and more responsibility I loved it. It can be stressful at times and some weeks there is loads on but never to the point of not being manageable.

This is one of the best things about GSK’s culture. My team and everyone I met didn’t treat me like an intern or placement student, and my role wasn’t like that either. I felt like I had a role that was integral to the team and everyone treated me like another employee, not like a placement student.

I had weekly catch ups with my manager, but could also approach them any time I needed their help or advice. I was around my manager everyday so it wasn’t like a distant, left alone situation. As well as this, my team we’re all there if I needed anything and my manager wasn’t available.

I think with this role as it is focused around content, it depends on what is going on week by week. Around the holidays I found myself with not a lot to do. Also, you can take on as much work as you want on top of your daily tasks. I frequently found myself extremely busy but more because I took on a lot of projects.

I was given a lot of extremely confidential material to format into articles, intranet pages, etc. My team trusted me to be able to get a lot done in a short space of time. But if I was ever unsure I could ask for help, it wasn’t like I was completely on my own.

I think spending time in a corporate environment was such a shock to the system at first. My confidence, written skills, time management, communication, have all dramatically inscreaed. Putting these into practice will be effortless as I now do it without thinking on a daily basis, and will help me a lot when thinking about applying for graduate schemes.

The office is pretty chilled out, it’s a very nice place to work. The dress code is smart casual, so you can get away with wearing black jeans and a smart top most days, as well as dress down Friday. Everyone is very friendly. There’s a street on the ground floor with many food places, etc.

It’s very well organised, you can tell that the team has had placement students before, they’re all used to them and training etc. There’s a society called IP Unite for social events and any help that placement students need throughout their year. I would definitely recommend this placement as you get a lot of exposure with important project and people.

I don’t know if I would say they invested in me in terms of spending money to train me, but I felt well trained and okay to ask if I needed more training or software they would provide it. After teaching myself how to edit videos, they bought me professional software to use.

I’m not applying for the graduate scheme, from what I’ve heard they are very hard on placement students as they’ve worked at the company for a year. I would love to come back to the company, and feel like I have been trained well enough to be able to do well in an assessment centre.

Yes, like I said we have our social society with social secs that arrange nights or etc. We have two big events in the year, the Christmas ball and the summer boat party. There are so many IPs across the sites, and everyone was really up for meeting people and arranging nights out, lunches, etc.

The only place we went to in Brentford was the pub down the road after work a few times, and that was a good price, but there’s not much to do in Brentford, if we were properly going out we would go into central London where obviously the prices would be higher.

Literally non existent in Brentford. As I said the pub is nice for a chilled one after work, but if you were going out you would want to get a train into central London because Brentford is really boring and there’s nothing to do. This wouldn’t really matter though as it is so close to central.

There were a lot of opportunities for charity events and raising money for charity, such as taking part in fun runs. I volunteered collecting money for save the children during work hours at Waterloo station at Christmas and that was fun. The charity partnership is save the children so there’s always lots to do in that area.