James Harlow

Country of origin: United Kingdom

Placement: Accenture

I decided to do a placement year to really get a feel for work life, so that I could come back to university and really utilise what I had learnt during my placement year into my studies and link what I’ve learnt to my experiences on my placement. Also I would hope it would enlighten me to take ‘small dips’ into areas I’d consider for the future.

The LUMS careers team were great in support and advice when preparing for my placement and I would not have been at Accenture without them. In fact the Accenture opening came directly from Rory Daly by email!

My role was as a Business Systems & Integrations Analyst, which is a bit of a mouthful and doesn’t really say anything about what I did. Essentially I’m was a Business Analyst aligned to Accenture’s technology Consulting Practice, where I was treated like any other graduate Analyst and not just a coffee grabbing intern. My first role was on a test team working at a large Telco, and my subsequent role was as a Business Process Analyst at a large Aerospace and Defence company. To briefly describe my role would be a difficult task, I’ve held multiple roles as I’ve matured through different projects, from running and managing offshore teams, to directly designing business operations processes as well as configuration for the client, it’s really been quite wild.

My placement experience was fantastic; on initial arrival we were told that we were like any other Analyst within the company, which was a great feeling, but definitely foreshadowed the high expectations from us, however, I can say that my experience on placement really has been invaluable. On my first project I was working on the test management team on a large SaaS based project, and from day 1 the expectations were there. Throughout the project I matured and became Integration and Defects lead, with my own offshore team and the ability to design my own tests and escalate defects. The beauty of Accenture is that you don’t have to be stuck in the same role, for the same client, in the same location. So I took the opportunity and switched projects and worked with the Functional Process team as Process Consultant on another large SaaS project in a different location, but this time I was given the ability to contribute to designing, which meant meetings with key client stakeholders and creating dissertation sized client facing design documents.

I can definitely say I’ve made some great friends with varying levels of experience while on placement with Accenture, from other Analysts, all the way to Managing Directors, friends that I’ll hopefully come across again in my future experiences. I also enjoyed how we weren’t seen as interns, we were all driven to our full potential, albeit tough sometimes, but definitely rewarding.