An unusual week this week with quite a lot of graduate activity happening. On Wednesday I attended the Scottish Graduate Careers Fair at the SECC in Glasgow. This involved manning the HBOS stand with a number of other graduates and talking to students interested in a graduate career. It was great fun and I really enjoyed talking to students who had a keen interest in HBOS. It was interesting the number of people I spoke to who had already looked up this website, which hopefully shows it is having an impact. The HBOS stand itself seemed popular; we even had someone from another employers stand asking about opportunities as she was very interested!

The following day on the Thursday I was through in Edinburgh doing some volunteering work with the other graduates on my programme. We were tasked to paint corridors inside a school which was in need of some TLC. This was great as we were doing something good for the community. HBOS paid for all the supplies and the graduates were the free labour. You see lots of teams doing this type of volunteering work, and it is something that is promoted around HBOS. It was a good team building day and we were all happy with the results, although I don't think any of us should give up our day jobs to become painters – they are the professionals in that department.

Placement wise I'm continuing to work on the financial process piece of work which has seen me attend a number of workshops to present the overall financial process flow which I had documented. Next steps on this are to have a further workshop using a revised version of the process flow as the driver to the meeting. It's good though to see that progress is being made.

I'm also getting involved in planning the deployment of Microsoft SharePoint for my project based team. We are looking to use the tool as a collaboration tool kit for the entire team. It's just at an early stage so I'll keep you up to date with this in the future.

Steep learning curve

The last couple of weeks have seen the introduction of the latest graduates to the graduate community across Group. This is an exciting time for the new guys, with all the current grads coming together to give them a warm welcome. I'm in the very fortunate position of being a 'buddy' to one of them, and so spent a fair amount of time last week ensuring that they were settling in ok, and helping solve any problems/queries that they had. Luckily there were no major issues, but I put this down to good planning! I think the 'buddy' relationship is great, I'm more than happy to help new graduates into the business by passing on the knowledge and experience I have acquired over the last 12 months. I also see this as a 2 way relationship so I'm looking forward to what we both get out of it in the months ahead.

On a placement front my team has recently completed a restructure. There aren't many new faces, but this is an exciting time as we have the opportunity to shape the team moving forward. This is something that is expected of graduates, we should all be full of 'fresh' ideas – a new way of thinking. So as the team begins to gel I'll be taking opportunities to impose my own ideas on the team before moving into my next placement!

My placement sits within the Programme Office for the payment services project team. Basically this project team are responsible for running all major projects affecting payment systems across HBOS. Recently I've been getting heavily involved in a piece of work designed to review certain aspects of the financial reporting process for all our projects. This is a challenging world to come to terms with due to the number of parties involved, and the wealth of financial data that exists. Having not come from a financial background hasn't helped my uptake of process but I joined this team to stretch myself to learn something radically new. I was keen to learn how projects are run and the processes that surround them, and I can tell you I'm certainly doing that! Over the next couple of weeks I will be attending a number of meetings to map the process from all the parties involved – getting to understand their piece of the pie!

On a lighter note I've just had word that the Group Graduates will be doing some charity work over the October school holidays. We will be working together to do some DIY at a local school in Edinburgh. I think they are looking for a new quiet zone for the pupils, so we will be working along side the school to help deliver this. I'm really looking forward to this as it will be a great team building exercise, and it's nice to deliver something for the community!