Jakub Tomkiewicz

Country of origin: Poland

Placement: adidas Group

Lancaster University’s Marketing department has been ranked top two in Britain for the past 3 years. This is a guarantee for my degree being valuable in the eyes of employers. However, in the increasingly competitive job market, more and more students bring in top-class education, I believe a placement is a game-changing point in my résumé. It assures all potential employers that I have learned not only good theory, but I also know how it is put it into practice.

As an intern in adidas Group, I was part of Global UX team. Working on both adidas.com and reebok.com, I would be able to learn all the processes that happen behind the sites. I worked with people from all different parts of the company, taking on different tasks and responsibilities, amongst others being: performing different tests (marketing research), analysing their outcomes, helping with developing an internal guidelines platform, managing content on product listing pages and finally leading my own project.

I believe it was a great decision to do the placement at adidas Group. First of all, I learned about the work environment in general – how to communicate well in it, what to prioritise and even the vocabulary used in this environment. I also learnt more specific things about different systems and tools used or what are do’s and don’ts both from business and UX/UI perspectives. 

The thing I really liked about my placement was that I was actually forming it myself. Alongside with my line manager, we would be agreeing on my next steps on a weekly basis. Before the placement at adidas Group I was not entirely sure about what could be the area of interest for me.

During ten months spent in Global UX Team in adidas, I realised that E-Commerce is something I enjoy exploring. Thanks to this experience, I was able to choose my final year University modules more wisely. I also know that the experience gained at adidas will help me with deciding about next steps on my career path once I graduate.

Before the placement we were all provided immense support from the LUMS Careers team. Not only were there organised lectures explaining the possible scenarios for our placements and tips how to deal with different situations, but we could also have a one on one session, to get more personalised advice.