Technical Analyst Placement Student Review

Working for Experian during my placement year was an amazing experience. It gave me a breadth of experience from coding to the more organisational and managerial aspects of the job. I found working for a large organisation insightful since there was a lot more to think about than initially meets the eye especially when considering international teams and clients. Everyone I worked with was very friendly and eager to help and my line manager was amazing! He really helped me learn the ropes at the beginning and supported me throughout the placement.

When joining a placement job there's the worry that since you are a placement student you won't be valued as much as if you were coming on board in a normal full-time role. However, at Experian, I was given real work which was important and values not only in the team but across the business. I definitely felt like a normal employee and a valuable member of the team rather than a hinderance. Part of this is because my line manager actively gave me the freedom to make my own decisions and allowed me to solve problems rather than just be told what to do which is one of the main reasons this experience was so good.

At Experian I had a great level of support available to me when I was stuck or needed help. However, at the same time, it wasn't overbearing. This allowed me to learn and adapt quickly to the role and ultimately have a bigger impact in the team. I felt like I had the right guidance at the right time which allowed me to be more autonomous with my decision making which is a much more valuable experience than just completing a list of tasks and calling it a day.

I felt like there was a good balance. Most days I had a mix of normal day to day work which was part of an ongoing project. Occasionally there would be the odd escalation but overall I was able to get on with what I had planned to do at the start of the day. However, other days we'd get lots of escalations and I would be very busy ensuring they are dealt with accordingly. This was a little overwhelming at first but once I know my way around the tools and technology we used it was very manageable and it also meant that not every day would be predictable. Also, my line manager encouraged a proper work-life balance which I think is really important especially when a placement you don't know what a bad or good work-life balance looks like.

I feel like I was given a good level of responsibility. I was running part of the project we were working on by myself while organising resource within our team and in external teams. This was exciting since it gave me a feel for a more managerial job and I enjoyed that aspect of it. I liked the fact that I was trusted with it and my line manager would checkin for updates and drive priorities but wouldn't control how I was organising it. I was allowed to work that out for myself (while giving me advice along the way) and this resulted in me working with the team to come up with a new, more efficient process for this activity. I was also trusted to commit code to the repository with a quick check before the commit. This allowed me to code freely and efficiently instead of being micromanaged which would have been counter-productive.

Some of the most valuable skills I've gained were ones I didn't even think of when starting my placement. The ability to write professional communications quickly, work with people to find a common solution and organising people are skills I had very little experience with and now feel very confident doing. I think working for a large organisation also helped this since it meant I had a wide scope of experiences that fed into these skills. I also learnt a lot about enterprise software and infrastructure and the training to go along with these tools which is very valuable and I now use this experience to inform decisions I made when making my own software projects in terms of service architecture and feature sets.

It was relaxed and inviting. Everyone was very friendly and we all got on very well. I enjoyed being able to work together in person easily and just the general social aspect of it.

The early careers program at Experian is quite mature and there was a good framework to allow people to develop professionally as well as connect you to other placement students in your cohort. This is great because everyone is a similar age so naturally gen on quite well. Also, we had multiple events together during office hours which went over things such as an introduction to Experian and CV building sessions. These were really useful and are a great part of the early careers program.

If a job came up in the same team or a junior software developer role I'd definitely apply!

We meet multiple times and it was great. However, covid-19 stopped us short.

Nottingham is quite cheap being predominantly a student city.

Nottingham city is nearly and the nightlife is brilliant.

There were quite a lot of charity events run by Experian.