Cezar Gherghel

Country of origin: Romania

Placement: IBM UK

I chose to take a placement year because I was very keen to see how my studies were relevant to a real business environment. Equally, I wanted to get valuable work experience that would better position me in the search for a graduate job.

I worked within the EMEA Project Office as a leader of the resolution team (RTL) for various critical client situations with System x and PureSystems hardware. The Project Office serves as the highest escalation point and is responsible for ensuring the correct skilled resource and priority is allocated to each ‘CritSit’ and providing a solution that is technically acceptable and within the client's timeframe.

This was - in theory - a non-technical role however technical knowledge of the hardware was greatly beneficial and all of my colleagues had some sort of core technical background.

From day one, I had significant responsibility, by having to produce reports which went out to distribution lists of over 100, of which a quarter were IBM executives. When I first joined, my role consisted of doing the reporting for the team.  Within an a few weeks, I reduced reporting time to a few hours a week and I was allowed to take on many other responsibilities, such as:

•             Leading resolution teams for over 25 critical situations for some of our biggest clients

•             Performing data analysis and putting together presentations for management and executive audiences to assist with strategic matters

•             Initiating and driving several other projects (branding of the team, new performance review system etc)

All in all, it was a fantastic year which saw me perform a variety of tasks and gain an invaluable wealth of knowledge and experience.

The support I received from my colleagues and IBM was incredible. At all times they were happy to mentor me and answer my questions – and I have asked a lot of questions. At the same time, my manager was very supportive of me taking on more challenging tasks and allowed me a great amount of freedom in choosing new areas to concentrate my work and learning.  Another aspect of the placement that I particularly enjoyed was the exposure that I had the chance to have, given the nature of our team’s activity, to senior management, executives and even clients.