Ross

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.