Saima Sharif - Barclaycard

What attracted you to Barclays?
What attracted me to Barclays was its name, its brand, its one of the best brands in the UK. I wanted to join the financial industry after my degree and on top of that the graduate scheme they were offering was exactly what I wanted to do so that was the perfect choice to me.

Why did you choose to join Barclaycard?
I wanted to join Barclaycard because of the graduate scheme they were offering. I was a marketing graduate and wanted to excel in this business field, and their graduate scheme is very based on marketing - different areas, different fields from brand management to general marketing roles to media and advertising. The whole programme was very well structured and that’s why I selected Barclaycard.

What does Barclaycard do?
In the graduate scheme we have to do three different placements. At the moment I am with Barclaycard partnerships. In this business area we work with different brands in the market, for example, we are partners with BHS, Thomas Cook and Argos, so basically they give us their brand and we provide the financial services to our customers to make most of our brands and services.

What does your current role involve?
I am currently working with partnerships and mainly marketing campaigns. But I am also involved in research projects because I was always interested to find out how our customers feel about our products and services. I am doing a campaign for all of our partners around all of our different deals, and the challenge that I have is that I have to come up with a template that is generic for all partners - that we can use and make it more cost effective for our business and which is effective in terms of getting more business from our customers.

What do you enjoy most about your job?
The best thing is the business areas - they trust in us, they give us responsibility, we are owning our projects, we are running them from start to end. So it’s the responsibility, it’s the trust in us and the challenge, every day there is something new to learn.

Can you outline any interesting projects you have been involved with?
During my first placement within communications, the part I particularly enjoyed was working with our MD. He is one of the executives, a very senior person in the business. So I had to communicate with him on a daily basis, which at the start was daunting because I was very junior and he was very senior, but once I got to know him he was very approachable and he made it very easy for me. That part I really enjoyed and through that experience I learnt a lot, working with such a senior member in the business.

What support and training have you had since joining?
During our programme, in our first and second placements, they have offered us quite a few courses and the course I would particularly like to mention is the leadership essentials course, because this programme is designed to make us the future leaders of Barclaycard. The leadership essential course is in four stages – they tell you how to work best in teams, how to be a good leader, how to manage your time and how to lead teams. So it was brilliant – I loved this course. And there were other courses, for example, one was the presentation skills course - I’m not the best presenter so on that course I learnt a lot and I believe I have improved on my presentation skills.

What qualities do you need to succeed at Barclays?
The qualities that you need to succeed in Barclays: you have to be organised, you have to be a good leader, you should know how to manage your time, be competitive and passionate about what you do.