Noe Meillon is a current Computer Science student who completed his placement year at Lloyds Banking Group. This post will give you an overview of his onboarding experience and what to expect when applying for placements.
In this blog, I will walk you through my onboarding journey as a Software Engineer IP within Lloyds Banking Group, but first, let me introduce myself. My name is Noe, I am from France, and I am in my penultimate year of a Computer Science BSc at King’s College London. I am currently trying to make the most out of my experience
at the amazing Card Servicing Lab.
While writing this blog post, I remember how stressed I was during my second year when I was applying for placements. It was quite complicated to combine study and applications, but I tried to find a compromise and work on my placement search only during the weekends. I know most companies’ recruitment process is quite long, for
instance, Lloyds Banking Group’s one was a 5 stages journey. Thus, to stay motivated throughout the process, I would advise you to question yourself about the reasons why you want to join the company, what it could bring to you and what you could bring to it. But anyway, I made it and received an offer – since then I felt really supported by Lloyds IP management, my line manager Scott and my IP mentor Nothando.
The first few weeks were enjoyable, I got to know my fellow IPs, placement facilitators, some senior managers as well as the IT troubleshooting team. During this week, I also dedicated time to learn new banking knowledge from the different market authorities to the different concerns that you should raise if you are, somehow, involved in an international money laundering scheme. Jira, DevOps, Java and IT tickets – those are the words I used to describe my job to my parents, I am unsure whether they understood what my job consisted of. Apart from those technical terms, I found the first two months really challenging, as I was learning a lot about the technology, the different tools used and the business processes we must comply with. However, I now feel fully integrated, operational,
and part of my team, Click to Pay, where I work as one of the three back-end engineers. Our goal is to provide microservices to help around five million customers to register easily with Visa’s Click to Pay service – an authentication token that provides customers with a quick means of online payment, without to need to
register an account or enter your card details on a merchant website. Thanks a lot for reading this far, I hope you enjoyed my onboarding blog post and are looking forward to starting your placement year