Product Engineering Intern

I really enjoyed my placement year at Volvo Group UK. I learnt a lot about the industry and found the experience really valuable in developing my social and communication skills. There was a lot of opportunity to get involved in interesting projects or industry events during the year which allowed me to work with and interact with various people, not just within Volvo Group but with other companies also in the same industry.

Personally, I felt extremely values by my colleagues in the team I worked with. I felt like they considered my input as important and appreciated a lot of the work I did while working with them. My team often encouraged me to get involved and trusted me to do my part to a high standard.

I was given some guidance by my supervisors, especially towards the beginning with planning projects and introducing me to the type of work I would be doing. From quite early on though I was left to complete my work / projects on my own and plan my own objectives to fulfil what was required, although I always felt like I could ask for help or guidance if I needed it.

Due to the type of work I was doing, where I worked on quarterly updates as well as big, long-term projects, I found my workload throughout the year was very up and down. Generally I had enough to do in my day-to-day work, but there were definitely periods where I wasn't so busy and periods where I was incredibly busy.

I was given quite a lot of responsibility during my placement. One of my projects ran for the entire length of my placement and was based around new legislation being implemented. I was trusted with the preparation for this implementation and did a lot of work communicating with government bodies and the Volvo headquarters in Sweden.

During my placement the skills I have improved on the most are my social skills. So the fact that I am now much more confident when presenting and can more easily communicate with others will definitely be useful in the future, from presenting at university to general communication through my career after university.

The atmosphere in the office was very friendly and relatively relaxed. Everyone I spoke to was always very nice and willing to help. Obviously being in a business there is a need to get work done and to meet certain deadlines, but people here and especially managers are very aware of not over-working or over-stressing their employees.

I think there could have been slightly more structure at the beginning of the internship. There was a weeks general induction to the office and the building, but I think having a hand-over period from the old interns to the new ones would have been very beneficial. I think the overall placement was set up well though, being based around project work with some tasks that enable you to integrate with the team.

Volvo UK do not have their own graduate scheme set up specifically for work in UK, so future employment can be a difficult prospect if you were wanting to go back to the same office or same team. However, there is an international graduate scheme if you wanted to stay within the company and this gives you the chance to travel internationally too.

During my time at Volvo there were quite a lot of interns, so you tended to find after a while that the interns split off into groups. I found I became good friends with some of the other interns and often did things outside of work with them. Personally, I also got on very well with my team and have socialised with them outside of work on a few different occasions.