Finance Summer Internship Review

I was in a financial analyst role so my jobs included developing an excel model to take commercial data and predict charges that we will incur to supply power to other businesses, and perform a strategic review of operation expenses for the whole of centrica buisiness solutions so that I could devise initiatives to improve our efficiency without impacting performance. I would meet with team leads to come up with these initiatives as to ensure we don't affect performance.

Yes, amongst the new skills I learnt were: power BI, advanced excel skills. I gained these skills by making my model in excel and visualising data in powerbi reports I improved: my presentation, meeting, corporate etiquette, email communication, time management, stress management, workload management. I developed these skills by presenting my opex review to both the managing director and finance director of CBS so that they may take my findings and act upon them. Word.

Yes, my responsibilities were for projects that had a real impact. My model will allow my team to check the commercial model much faster than before. My model will remove the need to manually check numbers by using a traffic light system to highlight forecasts that are out of tolerance. My strategic opex review was left largely up to me and it was my responsibility to do my investigations and justify financially any decisions/conclusions I came to.

The support and guidance was fantastic. Support-wise Centrica was fully behind me and helped whenever they could, I was dealing with harassment in my personal life that leaked into centrica and they couldn't have helped me more. My team were always there for me to answer any questions that I had and really helped me understand finance (especially since I don't come from a finance university subject). I genuinely couldn't say a bad thing about the support and guidance during this internship.

Very supportive, everyone was so nice it actually caught me off guard. Everybody was willing to make time to teach me about their roles and centrica as a whole. Everyone was willing to lend a hand for anything I needed even if it took time out their busy schedules. The support groups and mental health support is ingrained into the culture and it really shows, everyone seems happy to work here and I can understand why.

It was fantastic, I came into the internship thinking it would be boring but I couldn't have been more wrong. There was definitely opportunity to work on extra passion projects and you could really control your own internship. Teams make you feel included and I think that comes from the executive team who are big advocates for the intern and graduate programme. Centrica tries to hire graduates from the summer internship so knowing that there's a good chance of a job at the end is fantastic.

Yes

Go for it, really make the most of it. Expand your network and reach out to everyone you can. Everyone is lovely and will do their best to help and teach you as an intern. Even the CEO. By reaching out and going above and beyond will basically garuantee you a job. The work life balance is important and nobody expects you to put in silly amount of hours so don't. Just enjoy yourself.