Actuarial Consultant Review

Whilst it could be quite boring working from home, I still enjoyed my work. Sometimes I didn't have much to do, which wasn't enjoyable, but when I did have work it was good. They also made effort to make it more social, for example we had a peer group who we could have weekly chats with and we had some social events like a quiz. On the whole, it was enjoyable given the circumstances.

This was the second internship I did at Aon and I felt like I'd developed a good relationship with my team and they were interested to see how I was doing. They also appreciated the ways I helped out and were willing to spend time with me to help with work. I felt like the work I was doing was actually helpful and was a valued member of the team. The support and feedback from both my team and HR made us feel valued as interns.

The support from the HR team was great and you could tell a lot of effort was put into the programme with weekly sessions. We also had a 'buddy', who I had a weekly catch up with and was always happy to help, and that was really great. My manager was a lot of help too, and was always happy to help me out on the project I was working on with him. Really great support!

I was never too busy and there were some days where I didn't have enough work but I think on the whole I had a decent amount of work. Even if I didn't have client work to do, there were other things such as the intern project and the sessions with the other interns as well as learning opportunities online. I had to take it upon myself sometimes to ask for extra work or the next step, but that's too be expected.

I think I was given a good level of responsibility. I worked on two main projects: one of these was just independent but I could ask for help whenever I needed, and another was within a team where I was given client work to do which would then be checked by another team member and a senior actuary. The nature of the work meant I was independent in doing my own work but it was never solely responsible for anything important.

The specific work will not help as it is not relevant to my degree. However, the development of my excel and coding skills (in vba) will be great in any future jobs. I also learnt a lot about team work and overcoming challenges within my intern project. We also had a lot of sessions about mental health, working well, asking for feedback and these will be useful in the future. It was also good to develop my confidence.

This was a virtual internship due to COVID-19 and so there was no office. In some sense of the 'virutal office' i.e. team meetings and catch ups with colleagues, people were always really friendly and always had a chat before starting on with the actual work which was nice to have some social contact. From my internship in the past, people got on with their work when necessary but were always up for a laugh and had fun too.

Really well, especially given the fact it was made virtual due to COVID-19. There were a lot of sessions put on for us with the US and Asian interns, as well as 4 days of virtual training at the start. There was also a lot of good communication before the internship started. We were sent a laptop, montior, keyboard, mouse, laptop riser and headset before the internship started to prepare us to conduct our jobs.

There was a lot of investment- we had 20+ hours of training during the internship as well as 4 days of training at the start. Senior members of the team spoke to us in Story Hours, including the CEO. Within the team, we had a few training sessions at the start as well as a task to give us some experience of a particular type of work. We were given mentors for this too, and mine was always really happy to help out.

COVID-19 obviously may be a problem, as well as the merger with Willis Towers Watson. However, the communication from Greg Case and from the Early Careers Team suggests that grad recruitment will be similar to previous years. In my team, there are 3 interns and they usually only offer a job to 1- but other teams the recruitment seems to be a lot higher. They ran the internship during COVID-19 to be able to continue to recruit talent which seems positive.

We were all working from home and so it was difficult to have a social scene. However, I had regular peer groups meeting and I'd also have catch ups with my intern project before we got on with the project itself. Everyone was really friendly and got involved in the opportunities we did have, such as team socials and the pub quiz. It would have been good to have had more of these opportunities, but they are never the same virtually.