Palina Malash

Country of origin: Belarus

Placement: Deloitte

I saw a placement year as a great start to my career. Obtaining my first work experience during university time as well as finding out more about the area of my interest – consulting – early on seemed to be a fantastic opportunity. I also thought a placement year would be a good chance to learn more about different business functions and, thus, help me to better understand my strengths and weaknesses. Moreover, a placement year seemed to offer the possibility to stand out from the crowd upon graduation having a strong CV with a good reputable company name on it.

During my placement I was involved in three projects and each of them required certain tasks and activities to be conducted. In general, I was performing PMO (project management office) function, facilitating meetings, interviews and workshops with the programme stakeholders, managing the risk, change request and reporting processes and working with different functional leads on high-level project plan preparation. Depending on the specificity of the project I was also conducting analysis of the data provided by the client, helping the team to assess client’s IT processes, supporting recommendations preparation and helping with other ad-hoc technology advisory related tasks. I had several internal roles such as being responsible for knowledge management within Deloitte teams, developing Industry 4.0 capability and working with another IP student on IP Online Recruitment Strategy.

I found my placement year to be a very beneficial experience full of challenges and self-development. I significantly improved my personal skills and feel that the experience obtained will be a strong foundation for my future career. I obtained BCS certification, attended different training courses and extensively broadened my knowledge of IT processes and organisation. I was involved in the projects aiming to improve IT functions for one of the biggest international companies allowing me to learn a lot about the business world in general and manufacturing and banking sectors in particular. I also had an opportunity to travel within the UK and abroad. I was enormously impressed by Deloitte people, who were not just intelligent and skilled, but who were also true role models of great personal characteristics: they were genuinely nice and friendly, happy to help, guide and dedicate their time to me. I also found Deloitte culture to be very inclusive and supportive: every individual mattered and everyone’s opinion counted.

Following my graduation I would like to return to Deloitte to continue my career development in technology consulting. I would like to be part of the change Deloitte brings to its clients helping them with innovative solutions and, thus, facilitating the overall technological progress. I am very grateful to the LUMS Careers department for the support they provided me during the CV writing stage. I found group assessment and interview sessions organised by LUMS to be extremely useful in preparation for my actual assessment day at Deloitte.