Junior Manager Review

The work rate is way too high especially for the managers, sometimes you go 3 weeks or even a month without a day off and almost no time to yourself whatsoever. Living with your colleagues is good at first but if you don't get along with them then there is no time to enjoy yourself.

You do get a sense of family about the Champions program however, in certain cases there are personalities that just don't match in which case you feel isolated within your team. A few of us came up with a phrase to describe how we felt and that was 'surrounded by people, but still lonely'.

There was just not enough support for first time managers whatsoever. There is actually an issue in the management structure of the company itself which needs to be addressed urgently in my opinion.

A typical day in the life of a manager was waking up at 8, preparing for a meeting you had at 9, have the meeting, travel to your 'hub' at 10:30. From 11-1/1:30 you would have training at the hub. Then you would travel for 30 mins - 1 hour to your location. You would knock for 7 hours with a 30 minute break. Then you would finish at 9pm. Gather up the groups and get home for 10-10:30pm (although some people didnt have a car and got home at 11-11:30pm) then you would make dinner and go to bed. In this scenario you had no free time in the day whatsoever. Although, some days there were no meetings and so the start time was 10:30, I still don't think having only two hours free time a day is enough. On weekends you knocked for even longer however there was no 'hub' time.

This depended on the team you had. I feel there was an issue with recruitment here. People who are independent got a lot of responsibility. However, there were many people who simply did not want that responsibility and thus the managers had to pick up the slack. The senior managers were no help here as they assume that everyone 'wants' responsibility however, when you're told blank by your team that they want you to do everything for them there is no way around it really.

I did learn a lot from the experience, but not what I expected to. I learnt that companies aren't quite what they seem from the outside. I did develop my communication skills but i felt that was done within the first 3 weeks of the program, beyond that i learnt nothing new. This also shows that the program was too long. 11 weeks is a long time to be away from your family and you're giving up your entire summer and living in this 'champions' bubble where its hard to know what is going on in the outside world. Some people enjoy that however, I personally didn't

This again depended on the team you were put in. I know some people had a fantastic team and so they had a great time. For me my team just did not jell. No matter what I tried. Their philosophy was 'everyone can get along with everyone'. This is simply untrue and it meant I was miserable for a long time.

The organisation of this 'company' is definitely its biggest flaw. Nobody ever knew what was happening. We got all of the information last minute. For example, we had to be at a location 2 hours away at 9 am and found out the address of that location at 8am.

The training was good for the duration of the program. It was well structured and help you perform well at the job. I feel there should have been segregation more in the training however, like having sets at school. This is because there are clearly people who are better at the job than others and so both sets of people are being hindered by training together.

They are available, however the drop out rate of this program is extremely high. You can get a full time position within the firm however it is a very small company and so there aren't many full time employees. You can also do a year placement with them.

The only time you had to go out was the odd sunday night as mondays were the day off, which meant every club was either shut or dead. Simply however, there just wasn't enough time off to go out.

You have to pay for everything as it is a residential internship. The rent is cheap, only £50 per week however, u then have to pay for fuel in the car and if u don't have a car then the train fares which came to around £70 per week. As well as this food and anything else you need which means the entire basic pay package of £125 per week is used up on living expenses.

I was in south london so had a great location but as I said just didn't get a chance to experience any of it as the only time we had to go out was a sunday.

No.