My Placement Experience

At the end of July 2019, I completed a 13-month placement at Bosch Lawn and Garden as a Commercial Marketing and Branding Intern. My role included various tasks and projects such as: creating daily and monthly sales reports, examining competitor information, website content creation, briefing and managing the development of POS, video and photo shoots.

A highlight of my year was creating an advertising video to communicate that the product was compatible with Amazon Alexa. I created and designed a brief which was given to an agency to shoot and I was then involved in the post shoot editing. It was great to see my vision come to life and it is now being used on the Bosch website and YouTube.

There were many skills I learnt whilst on placement, surprisingly these were softer skills that were not marketing related but will be transferable across any discipline.

In particular, I enhanced my ability in excel. Before starting at Bosch, I had very basic knowledge on excel and all the different formulas there are. After a couple of months of practise and support from colleagues my abilities significantly improved. I can now confidently use a variety of functions such as VLOOKUP, SUMIF and can create pivot tables. By the end of the year end of the year I even had colleagues asking me to help with their excel queries.

I have also grown in confidence both personally and in my professional knowledge. I have completed multiple professional presentations and interacted with various agencies and customers which has enhanced my communication skills.

Since returning to the University of Brighton I feel focused and eager to complete my degree, I have adopted the mentality of working 9-5 on my studies which has helped me to keep on top of my assignments.

Completing a placement has helped me to establish a better idea of my career direction once I have graduated. It has reinforced that I would like to pursue a marketing role; I enjoyed the branding side so will be looking at roles that include creativity and design.

I would recommend anyone to who is considering doing a placement to definitely complete one. It provides you with a great foundation to complete your final year of university and gives you a great opportunity to put your theoretical knowledge into practice.