EMEA ERC Generalist Review

I really enjoyed my placement at Adobe. I felt included in the team and treated fairly from day 1 and throughout the remainder of my time there. The company culture is really what made the placement year for me. Adobe promotes creativity, diversity and leadership in everything that they do, which as an employee, makes you feel proud to work there. I gave the experience an 8 as opposed to a 9 or 10, purely because during the year, I realised that the role I was in didn't play to my strengths/match my career aspirations.

My colleagues made me feel a valued asset to the team, and always showed gratitude to myself and to each other. We even had a specific employee group, with the wider team, dedicated to acknowledging each other's achievements and celebrating people that have gone above and beyond. As an intern there is that doubt at the beginning that you may feel like a burden as opposed to an asset. However, this was not the case and my managers were genuinely thankful for my contributions.

During my first 2 weeks I was given a detailed onboarding plan of all the people that I would be meeting, all the tasks that I would be taking over and at what point I was expected to have learnt different skills/tasks. This made my transition into the job a lot easier as clear expectations were set from the start. I had weekly 1:1s with my manager throughout the year and even quarterly catch-ups with my skip level manager, where we discussed professional development. I was also given a buddy and she gave closer support throughout the year on more of the day to day work, which was a huge help.

Adobe is a fast-paced working environment. If you enjoy being pretty busy and always working on new and different opportunities then you definitely wouldn't find the workload too overwhelming. As with any job, the workload peaked and dipped throughout. However, there was never a time when I was bored, always something to be working on. Generally 90% of the time I did finish at 5pm daily. There were a couple of occasions where I was too busy, but this was quickly solved due to the great management and team support.

Within the first couple of months of the placement, once my onboarding was complete, I was treated pretty much the same as the full-time employees on my team. I was given my own case load to work on that I was in full control of. I was even given the opportunity to work on projects with stakeholders and even lead a couple of my own smaller projects. My manager always allowed me to take ownership of my work.

I think being in a HR Generalist role, it gave me so many transferable skills that I will use both in my final year and in future jobs. For example, organisation, time-management, process creation and alignment, administrative tasks, project management, interpersonal skills and many more. The placement was very well-rounded and even though I decided that I wouldn't want to continue in this type of role in the future, the skills that I have learnt I will use for years to come.

A great office atmosphere, even though it is a huge co-operation I felt like I was working in a small business. This is because everyone took time to chat to each other in the mornings and it was a very friendly environment, even outside of my immediate team. Sometimes it was a bit quieter, especially towards the end of the week, due to the companies flexibility with working from home sometimes, which a lot of employees take advantage of.

The first initial couple of months were well organised due to the great structured onboarding plan. However, I feel that there could have been more structure throughout the internship to make into more of a "programme". For example, having blocked out hours during the week for shadowing different teams etc. this would keep that consistent learning throughout. The way the internship is currently structured, is that (maybe partly due to being given a lot of responsibility) sometimes it felt like a regular full-time job as opposed to a 1 year internship.

Adobe invests in a lot of professional and personal development platforms that i had full access to during my internship. There is a wide library of online courses to browse through and complete, I found these very insightful and useful. We had quarterly check-ins also, which a lot of the discussions during those were on personal development and future career aspirations, my manager made sure that I didn't lose awareness/focus of things I did and didn't find interesting throughout the placement year.

My manager and skip-level made it very clear throughout that the organisation is big on retaining talent as much as possible and previous interns have found graduate employment with the company, which is positive. I would definitely love to come back to Adobe at a graduate level, I think it would be a great company to start a career in. They are big promoters of hiring employees with potential and educating/training them, so I can see why so many interns want to come back.

All of the interns in the Maidenhead office made friends pretty quickly. Even though we were all pretty busy, we made sure to eat lunch together twice a week and catch up. We also once a week on a Wednesday all went for a few drinks at the pub round the corner from the office. We have a group chat that even now after finishing the internship, still chat and catch-up on sometimes, which is really nice.

I am from the North England so the cost of living in the area seemed quite expensive for me, I paid £500 a month rent for a 5 person house share in Maidenhead. However, I lived in walking distance from the office so saved a lot of money on commuting costs. With regards to socialising, the few pubs and bars in Maidenhead are reasonably priced. However, due to Maidenhead being a very small place, I spent time socialising in Reading and London instead which is obviously slightly more expensive.

There isn't really a nightlife in actual Maidenhead (where the office is based) there is only a few pubs and bars. However, the office is a 7 minute walk from the train station and Maidenhead is a short train journey (approx 15-20 mins) from Reading and London, both of which have great Night life especially for students. Even if London is a bit expensive for you, there is such a variety of things to do in Reading.

There was many volunteering opportunities to get involved in outside of my day to day job. For example, the site council would run different projects and I spent a couple of afternoons in the London office volunteering for charities. There are some sports classes such as yoga, football and running that are great for getting to know people if that's where your interests lie. They also host "lunch and learns" where different people will volunteer to do talks on their life and career etc.