
Five Things I Have Experienced and Felt during My Placement
Hiya, I am Sheila, a BSc (Hons) Accounting student, and I’m currently doing a Risk Management placement in Lloyds Banking Group as a Modelling Analyst. I am on the Consumer Credit Risk Modelling team, who build models to monitor and assess the bank’s capital reserve adequacy for its lending business and also check customers’ creditworthiness to see if they are eligible to borrow money from the bank, such as mortgages and loans. On one of my typical days, I do some second analyst reviews for my colleagues, writing code to fix some small issues and recording them in our team change log to make sure everything can be traced back, running codes to get final output data and then building models to form high-level management information for the team and wider stakeholders.
For those considering taking a placement year, I have five things that I would love to share with you about my placement experience so far:
- Since my work is all about coding and data analysis, this is a completely new field for me to learn; a lot different from what I have learnt from my university degree. Thus, my horizon has been widely broadened and now I have learnt a lot of new technical skills – such as SAS coding language, Python and PowerBI Data Visualisation – and improved my soft skills (mainly interpretation, presentation, and time management) for my future development.
- This experience gives me a valuable chance to carefully rethink about my future career pathway. As per before, I only saw myself walking towards accounting and auditing, but after learning coding and data, I find myself really interested in it and actually do well at this. Therefore, I reckon this placement creates a new choice for my future jobs to be considered in a good and exciting way. Another thing in terms of future jobs is that this placement experience has enhanced my compatibility and strengthened my career direction more clearly.
- This sandwich course setting helps me have better understanding of what I should focus on in my final year and what I could potentially choose as my optional course. For example, I have accumulated practical knowledge and approaches of some financial models related to Financial Derivates, which can put me ahead of others and generate better results when doing research or conducting group projects as now I know what is important in the Finance world.
- If you want to apply placement to explore more career opportunities, the top tip from me is to do it with courage and confidence. Just be careful with application dates and submit the application without hesitation. Most of companies will open their application channels in late August or early September and they are rolling bases, which means first come, first in. Looking for a confidence boost now? Check these different sources where you can find the vacancies: the company’s website, LinkedIn, the University’s Career Service, and I highly recommend Career Fairs. There is also lots of support you can get from the University, alumni, and your Programme Director if you want to start to take the first steps now.
- One last sentence: Make the most out of the application process with personal step-by-step progress and this invaluable one year; then enjoy every single minute!
Written by Sheila, current BSc Accounting student at AMBS
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