Baker Hughes, who have taken our students for a number of years have an open internship at their Cramlington office (this is in South-East Northumberland and is not that far from Newcastle).
When starting your internship, it’s important to make a good first impression and set yourself up for a good year. These are some things I wish I had known the first week of my internship to get the most out the experience.
1. Get to know your role
It is important to know how your role fits into the company and what your responsibilities will be. It will help you meet and exceed your manager’s expectation and show that you are dependable and responsible. If not entirely clear from your job description, it’s perfectly okay to ask for clarification of what tasks are expected of you and the projects you will be working on. By learning what success looks like in your role, you are much more likely to achieve it and put forward your best work.
2. Start a ‘success’ document
Start creating a document for recording projects and tasks you have particularly enjoyed or succeeded at and how it impacted the company. It will help keep track of your achievements and can be used for a number of reasons. Firstly, it can be used when having check-ins with your manager, to show what tasks you have accomplished or how you have helped other team members. Alternatively, it could be used to reflect at the end of your internship, to demonstrate how you were successful in your role and how it has benefitted you and the company, to help gain a return offer. It could also be helpful for updating your CV after your internship or giving something to talk about during future interviews.
3. Introduce yourself to everyone
Try and get to know people during your first week. One way to remember everyone is by writing down their name and a brief description of their role after meeting them. People will appreciate you learning their name and it will help build friendships. It will also make it easier to initiate conversation in the future, such as when asking for guidance or advice, and help you to work better in a team.
Learning about peoples’ roles will help you learn more about the structure of the company and how it operates. By networking with others, you are more likely to be given the opportunity to work with other teams and gain new experiences and skills.
4. Learn the structure of your day
The first week of your placement is the perfect time to establish a good routine at work. To do this, learn how often to check-in with your manager, whether that should be daily or weekly, as well as other team members when collaborating. This will help you stay organised and better plan for these meetings.
As well as this, set up a routine for your own day for maximum productivity. This could be creating a list of daily objectives each morning, checking your emails at a certain times and using your most productive hours to complete more difficult tasks. This will help you stay focused and maximise your time.
5. Volunteer for projects
When possible, volunteer for projects at work. This will help you learn new skills and gain experience you might not otherwise get. It will show your enthusiasm for the role and your willingness to learn. You are also more likely to be remembered for future projects which could lead to more opportunities with the company. Your placement is what you make of it and you can get more experience by putting yourself out there and expressing what you want to do.
Staying up to date with industry is no easy task but it is a huge plus for you in the eyes of employers as it shows engagement, understanding and interest from the get-go. University can be quite limiting in this regard with a focus on teaching the theory. Independent research shows initiative and helps you gain additional skills to make you stand out.
Here are a few different resources that might help you become a great independent learner!
Forage
This is something I have talked about on the blog before (click here for the link) but it is so good that I just have to bring it up again. Forage is an online virtual work experience platform that hosts several online programs built and endorsed by a slew of big companies.
Each of the courses contains tasks engineered to simulate the real-world experience of the industry and each only takes a few hours to complete.
As part of your degree, you get access to all the courses for free and you can do as many as you want. Try a range of them out and see which you think are most useful to you. They are always adding more courses so be sure to check in every now and then to see what is new!
GitHub Portfolios
Another great way to see what might be happening in industry is through the projects people have on GitHub. Be it personal projects worked on the side by industry experts or fully designed resources to help you learn about new topics, there are tons of exciting code to get stuck into. You might not understand a lot of what you come across, but it will give insight into different topics and show your interest in your chosen field!
Here is a GitHub portfolio that contains links to even more GitHub portfolios!
Podcasts
A great many companies have podcasts now, so not taking the time to listen and learn from them is a wasted opportunity for gaining insight into industry! You can search for either certain topics that interest you, or specific companies to learn what they are talking about at the time. You can listen to well-made interviews, debates, and discussions from industry veterans all while continuing your day-to-day life. Podcasts are a powerful tool that you should take as much advantage of as you possibly can. To learn more about podcasts and see some great ones to start with, look at this article.
Twitter
This social media platform may seem out of place here with the other resources discussed, but it is in fact a prime example of one of the best resources available for independent learning: people.
A great way to find out what is happening in industry is to see what people are saying! Platforms like Twitter let you search by company or topic and can lead you down an interesting rabbit hole of first impressions, detailed threads, and everything in-between. Following those who create content or make comments on a certain topic will let you start building a network and learn more about the industry. And of course, you can directly message those with industry experience, and you may just get a response back with more interesting insights.
You do have to be careful though as there is a lot of content on platforms like Twitter and it might be difficult to decipher what is relevant and what is not.
These are just a handful of useful tools to continue your education journey beyond university. They are by no means a comprehensive list so be sure to explore and find some of your own!
It can be extremely daunting when looking for a new job. I’m about to graduate this year in Computer Science and have spent hours scrolling through job posts online. So when I heard about this new recruitment platform, Otta, I was very intrigued.
It is a tech startup launched in 2020 that claims to ‘help you find your perfect job’ in tech. They have an extensive number of companies hiring on the platform, all of which have been vetted by the team at Otta. They say they only have the ‘most exciting, innovative and fast-moving companies’. ‘From startups to tech giants, you’ll find over 3,500 top companies and 70,000+ live jobs on Otta’.
According to Otta, they are more transparent about job opportunities than other recruitment platforms and include unbiased reviews, salary insights, diversity, and their honest take on every company.
The aim of the company is to help you be ‘picky’ and find your dream job. We tested it out to see if it was as good as it claimed to be.
Creating an account
Firstly, you have to create an account to view any job posts. To do this, you have to complete a quiz to assess the type of job you are looking for. This will allow Otta to only show you relevant job posts.
It asked questions such as what type of roles would you like to see, where would you like to work, when do you want to start, your preferred company size and your minimum expected salary.
Then it moved on to more tech-based questions, such as what industry you would like it work in, where you could select options such as AI, Security, eCommerce etc. As well as your favourite technologies to use, where you could select options such as Python, Java, AWS, SQL and many more.
I found it really useful that Otta asked these more technical questions, as most recruitment platforms, that are not tech-specific, do not include filters for these options. This seems like it will help you find roles that are more suited to your skills in tech as it is such a varying industry.
It was also just fun to complete this questionnaire and start thinking about exactly what you want to do as a career, rather than just choosing a position that is available.
View your roles
After creating an account, Otta showed me ten roles to swipe through that were suited to me from my questionnaire. You could either save or apply to any of these jobs and after going through the ten, could generate new results. It was easy to use and all of the roles interested me.
However, my favourite part was the description of each job. It included what the job involved, the company mission, insight into the company, company benefits, links to articles about the company and the people at the company. It was much more in-depth than on any other recruitment platform I have seen and allowed me to easily learn about the company I was applying for. I particularly liked the transparency of the description, including the salary benchmarks and statistics included by Otta such as growth rate and diversity.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I really enjoyed using Otta. I believe it is perfect for people wanting to find graduate jobs or internships in tech. However, it is probably not as suitable for people in other industries. Overall, I found it a lot easier to use than traditional recruitment platforms and found relevant roles were much quicker to find.
My favourite part of the platform was the availability of information and the transparency for each job. It gave me more insight into each company and helped me better understand if I would be a suitable fit for a role. I hope this is something other recruitment platforms will do in the future.
I will definitely be using this platform again, alongside other tools, such as the NU Careers service and LinkedIn, to find my next job. Find the website here.
Have you ever wondered what it is like to work in consulting?
Do you want to apply your analytical and coding skills to tackle a real business problem?
Sign up for our Oliver Wyman HackAtOW challenge! You will meet other European students and young professionals, join a multicultural and multi-background team and tackle a concrete innovation challenge to help one of our clients to make an impact on their business!
This is a unique opportunity to test your coding skills and be part of an international challenge while also having the opportunity to learn specific technical skills and soft skills from Oliver Wyman experts and peers.
The finalists will go to Madrid to pitch their idea in front of a jury and the winning teams will receive a prize and will have fast-track access to the selection process to join Oliver Wyman. Travel costs for the final phase are covered by Oliver Wyman.
The Challenge
One of our top Retail clients has hired Oliver Wyman to help understand their promotional program and assess the environmental impact.
You will be in charge of helping the client to understand the sales profile of key products and their current promotional program by looking at the sales and the promotion data.
Phase 1 – Offline Participants will understand the client needs, evaluate them and provide a comprehensive analysis applying advanced analytics, machine learning and coding skills. You will be provided with specialized mentors on the most innovative content and methodologies.
Phase 2– Live in our Madrid Office Selected teams will prepare a short pitch, answer questions and defend it in front of a jury of Oliver Wyman Experts.
You will receive feedback and training on templates, frameworks, and how to make a perfect pitch, with which you will present your idea to the judges.
Delve into the challenging topics, come up with your own ideas and work with the team to develop a winning solution.
You will expand your network and meet students from other European countries and the Oliver Wyman team!
Prizes
In total, there will be two winning teams and all the finalists will have fast-track access to Oliver Wyman Data & Analytics selection process.
Winner (1st Prize): up to 2.000€/winning team
First Runner-Up (2nd Prize): up to 1.000€/winning team
Who can Register
This is the right challenge for you if you are:
Student in the penultimate or final year of university studies, or recent university graduate or young professional with a quantitative academic background (Mathematics, Statistics, Physics, Computer Science, Informatics, Data Science, or Engineering).
Fluent in English
Additional fluency of the local office language that you are interested in for those outside of the UK (Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain)
Comfortable using a programming language to explore and analyze data e.g. Python or R
Enthusiastic about exciting questions and challenging topics in a quantitative environment
Able to work in a team and a quick learner
Keen to have fun with us!
Please note that you can participate individually or in a team of 2 members.
Timeline
Finalist teams or individuals will fly to Madrid on Thursday 20th
Travel, accommodation, and meals will be provided.
