I thought I would explain more about my role and give a bit of detail around the aspects I am involved in on a day-2-day basis.

I work in the 'Risk' department of Retail IT, basically this department designs, develops and maintains all the systems used to support the business in balancing risk and operating a regulatory environment – this can include things such as fraud prevention, credit decisioning and anti-money laundering checking.

Given the size of the business some of these systems can be very large and complicated – especially when you get into aspects such as real-time processing.

In terms of my typical activities, normally on a morning I'll come in and pick-up with the support team in India whether there have been any issues with the system batches overnight. Usually things are fine and everything has worked, other times there might have to be follow-on actions to fix any issues or begin to liaise with other teams in HBOS to resolve. I don't technically fix the issues myself but co-ordinate the responses in the various teams and manage the users expectations about when any problems will be resolved.

Later in the day there will typically be a team meeting to catch-up with the latest activities on the project and ensure that what ever phase we are in that we are actively managing the issues.

Currently I am also managing the implementation of the project I am working on – this involves a lot of up front planning to ensure that when we put the new system live it goes in right first time, doesn't affect any other critical systems and that the it meets the users requirements. I may have time blocked out to continue the implementation planning for instance or host a workshop with the users to walk them through the approach and activities for putting this new system live.

Then, depending on what I am involved in outside of my project I may have some 'graduate' work to undertake as part of being a member on the scheme. I'll go into more detail in my next blog about graduate activities but typically we can spend 20% of our time on activities outside of our day-2-day project role.

So, by the time I have got through most of that – plus a lot of emails, phone calls, chats and meetings is usually the end of the day!

I'm writing this today from Edinburgh – my 'base' is West Yorkshire, specifically Halifax at the moment although I have worked at most of our other sites in and around West Yorkshire.

In my current role I get to travel relatively occasionally which adds variety to the job - later this week I'll be in London to meet with one of our suppliers who are working on the project I am involved it so it’s a busy week.

The IT Leadership scheme is structured through a series of placements of which there is a fair degree of flexibility in choosing what you want to do, aligned to your development requirements.

For instance, generally each placement will be in a different area of IT, doing a different type of work and with added responsibility.

I find this is one of the best aspects of the scheme – the variety offered by undertaking different placements and roles is beneficial in building my experience and offering fresh challenges. You also build a network of contacts and friends throughout the organisation – especially helpful when you need a favour or know the right person to speak to!

The Retail IT department is so large and is involved in so many different areas that it's no problem finding something different and new.

A bit about me...

Hi there, just a short one this week – I thought in this blog I would outline a bit of my background and why I chose to work for HBOS.

I started working for HBOS at the end of 2004 in Retail IT on the IT Rapid Graduate Programme. I had come straight from university at Loughborough from doing an engineering degree and before that my A-Levels.

I managed to fit a bit of travelling between graduation and starting work towards the end of the year – it was great to have a long summer knowing that all the hassle of getting a job had been sorted!

I didn't have any prior experience in the IT/finance industry especially but I liked what I had learnt about HBOS and believed the IT/Technology scheme was for me.

I had started the application process pretty early in 2004, towards the end of my final year at university I was in the very fortunate position of having a couple of offers from different companies – in the end I chose HBOS because of the company culture and the opportunities available.

From my assessment days and follow-on events I had opportunities to learn what the company was really like and the quality of people who work here. I didn't necessarily get the same good 'feelings' from the other companies. You really are valued as an employee here and the culture is very open. For me it was one of the deciding factors, in conjunction with the quality of the development programme that made me pick HBOS.

I would recommend making the most of any assessment days/ events/ interviews etc to dig deeper into what the company is really like and understand its culture and working environment.

Andrew