Supply Chain Industrial Placement Review

My role as part of the global learning and capabilities team for Supply Chain requires me to oversee and promote the learning programmes created for our SC colleagues. We are also working towards building a learning culture inside of SC.

I was given a lot of responsibility from the get go. It was good because that is what I was hoping from a placement experience. However, I cannot say it wasn't difficult at times, especially if your line manager has a lot of direct reports and has to support all of them and you are struggling a little.

My role requires me to create learning programmes and promote them. In order to create them, I need to talk to a lot of different people about subject matter at hand. This helped to improve my communication skills and my organisation skills as some projects are quite large and have many moving parts. I also need to regularly communicate with stakeholders to let them know how the project is moving along.

You get the support from your line manager in your day to day which is good. My wider team was also very supportive and nice so that was great. You also get support from the wider early careers team as they organise many training sessions throughout the year and these training sessions are often useful. They do like to build a community amongst the IP, UFLPs and apprentices.

Unilever has a nice company culture, there is a lot of emphasis on looking after your wellbeing and it never sounds false, like they genuinely do care for their employees. The company has organised some F2F events but I am sure it wasn't as many as they would have liked due to COVID-19.

I have enjoyed my placement a lot. It was in a role that I never imagined myself doing but I've gained a lot of different skills that I know will be useful any role. My LM was always pushing me (in an encouraging way) to do better and my team was a great and supportive team. I would go back to Unilever but I would try a different role.

Yes