My main reasoning for opting to go on a placement year was to put my education from the first two years at university into practice and to bridge the gap between education and real life working practices. I also liked the idea of gaining experience for a year to broaden my knowledge beyond what I could learn at university through direct exposure to work – I believe this exposure will also aid my studying in the final year of university. Finally, I also had the future in mind and the value of gaining real-life working experience for a year, at a leading organisation, was too great to ignore. 

I spent my placement year working in an internal function of PwC called Resource Management. The primary aim of the function was to place the right PwC people on the right job opportunities to maximise efficiency and ensure we utilised our people in the most effective way. During the first 5 months of my placement, I worked in a new team within Resource Management called the CoRE (Centre of Resourcing Expertise) which was created to centralise tasks and processes into one team to improve efficiency across the function. In this team I also took a leading role in creating an information “Toolkit” and “Knowledge Sharing” intranet web-page designed to encapsulate the knowledge within the function and to drive consistency in the way people worked across Resource Management. 

During the final 7 months of my placement, I worked in a Management Information team. My main roles in this team required me to meet people across the function to understand their reporting/system requirements and creating/updating reports to match these requirements. I also worked with many different computer systems to aid in reporting and also to improve data quality of the information the firm held, alongside many other ad-hoc tasks.

I would summarise my placement as a great learning experience, where I have not only learnt a lot about working practices but also built on personal skills - I believe my confidence and people skills have grown substantially since I started my placement. I would also summarise the placement as an opportunity to be involved with real working projects with real responsibilities and pressures. However, above all, I believe the placement was an extremely enjoyable experience.   

Although I was aided with very good training, guidance and advice whilst at PwC, what I liked the most about the placement was the trust and responsibility I was given. My managers were happy for me to own projects and take leading roles on them whilst always remaining available for advice when it was needed. I believe the trust I was given is what allowed me to enjoy the placement experience.

LUMS definitely helped me effectively with my placement preparation. Firstly, I appreciated that LUMS staff allowed me to send in my CV for them to look at and advise on improvements. Furthermore, I also found the OWT250 module at the end of second year extremely useful and insightful – especially advice and tips the LUMS staff had to offer throughout this week.  Finally, I also found LUMS very engaging during the start of my placement by assigning me with a LUMS contact who came to visit my placement, whilst also being available for me to contact them. Although I didn’t have to use the contact – it was always comforting to know that should an issue occur at work, there was someone I could have contacted for advice.