Going into any new role, my first thought is always around the culture and the team I’m coming into since, generally speaking, I feel that makes or break the role as well as the kind of manager I was going to have. I work in the corporate customer solutions team within BPS in Barclaycard and I have to say the culture has been a real eye-opener. I had always pictured a rather serious environment with overworked employees, but that is not the case. It’s an engaging environment and people apparently know a joke or two around here, especially my line manager.

At Barclays, or most banks, you are expected to deliver your work at a high standard, but Barclays also takes great care of its employees whether that’s by providing flexible working hours to new mothers or fathers, or providing additional support to those who may need it. I can speak for this as a deaf intern – I was provided sign language interpreters or palantypists whenever I needed it with no explicit limit being imposed on the cost of my support, which goes to show that Barclays is intended on giving all employees an equal playing field of making a success.

One last thought from me is that I was really impressed with how willing directors and managing directors were in finding time in their incredibly congested schedules to give advice, which is something I will look to make a critical part of my ethos going forward.

I was given few projects to work on from developing payment propositions for the government, financial services, and utilities & telecoms sectors to the hubs simplification project. The hubs simplification project looked at simplifying the number of Sharepoint sites which stored important documents and materials that fed into several work streams across many teams within BPS.

When I started the project, I had to work with six stakeholders in developing a strategy for a single Sharepoint site, but over the course of my internship that now has ballooned to twenty-three stakeholders! That included people from products, marketing, propositions, IT, strategy and commercial planning teams. I’m pleased to say that I delivered a presentation on the goal and direction of the project to a large group with no objections being raised, and I believe that this is a real testament to Barclays’ values.