University Recruitment Co-ordinator Review

I really enjoyed my placement at GSK, it had everything I was looking for in my internship. I was treated not as an industrial placement student but as any other member of the team, I was given responsibility from the first day onwards and I had a good social life with the other industrial placement students.

Throughout my year at GSK I felt valued, respected and was constantly treated as an equal amongst my colleagues.

Every employee at GSK has a personal development programme, which analyses your behaviours or competencies against the key behaviours that GSK looks for in its employees. My manager went through the competencies and analysed where I excelled but also where there was room for improvement. I was then given targets and projects which were designed to improve my competencies. I was also given the opportunity to work within other departments, to find out more about what other parts of the business do.

I found that my role had the perfect amount of pressure and workload. I was always very busy, which meant there was always lots of variation and my days just flew by!

I was very lucky within my placement because my role was originally a full time member of staff's role. I therefore had set responsibilities and targets to fulfill within my placement.

I found my placement very beneficial because not only did it put some of the areas that I learnt within my degree into practice and perspective I also learnt a lot about the kind of activities that I like to get involved in. This has given me a much better idea of the kind of roles and companies that I would like to apply for once I graduate.

The culture within GSK is fantastic. Over the whole year at GSK I have never met anyone who wasn't friendly or more than willing to help with any issue that I may have had. In addition as there were so many placement students at GSK House we always went to lunch together any often out after work or at weekends.

My industrial placement was very well organised. When I started I had a thoruough induction process not only learning about my role and team but also about GSK as a whole. I was then given constant support throughout the placement.

GSK has a number of online learning programmes which they encourage all staff to complete depending on your role and interest areas. In addition my team invested a considerable amount of time to constantly give me tasks and projects that challenged me to improve my behaviours to make me more employable in the future.

Currently there is not currently a HR Graduate Scheme, GSK is looking to create one. As GSK is such a large and diverse company there are a huge amount of direct entry opportunities for me to apply for once I graduate

The social scene at GSK was very good. As there were around 60 industrial placement students within my building there were always people to have lunch with and we often went on nights out. Additionally, I lived with 3 other industrial placement students which really added to my experience

As we lived in suburbs of London the cost of living was quite expensive compared to people who had placements in the North. However I found that I had enough money from my wages to live, socialise and go on holiday.

Directly by the offices there are not many good places to go for after work drinks. However in the near by area there are some nice bars in areas such as Richmond and Chiswick. Additionally central London was only 30minutes away on the underground.

As GSK House is such a large building there were endless opportunities to get involved in social, charity and sports. I joined the early careers network and also took part in some charity work.