Trainee Project Manager Review

Workload was extremely limited for the duration of my placement. I spent weeks completing optional online training just for something informative to do, with few opportunities to contribute to meaningful project work. When this eventually came, it consisted of setting up project trackers and maintaining them after meetings etc. Also creating skeleton documents for the Senior PMs to input information that I didn't have access to at a later date.

Very limited responsibility. Setting up meetings and tracking progress were about as far as this stretched.

I would say that I have developed my organisation and communication skills across the year. I had plenty of practise with sending a variety of more formal and informal emails. Also bullet pointing during meetings and then typing these up afterwards helped to develop my ability to note take efficiently.

My line manager was always available for a chat and to answer any questions that I had. Very helpful and I appreciated this a lot. Unfortunately the workload just wasn't there for them to delegate many tasks to me and it very much felt as if they had been told that they were taking on a placement student and that was that. The support from the company as a whole was all but non-existent, and to emphasise this, the previous year's placement student had been provided the opportunity to attend an in-person training and networking course at Head Office in London. It turns out that the company declined to offer this experience to placement students this year, opting only to provide it to graduates.

It was extremely rare that more than a handful of people in my team were in the office together at any given time so it's hard to say that there was much of an atmosphere at all, however, everybody was very friendly.

I found it difficult to enjoy this placement as the workload was minimal, the in-person training and networking opportunities were minimal, and I never found that I felt as if I were really valued or of much use a lot of the time. I was hoping for a year where I could meet a lot of professionals of all ages within a sector that I wished to progress into post-Uni, this unfortunately just wasn't the case and has certainly made me rethink my career choice moving forwards.

No