The Marketing & Products Programme

Length of programme: 18 months
Location: Coventry and Canary Wharf, London
Placements: Four

Placements

You’ll have four of these, giving you exposure to all sorts of marketing and product development activity. Here’s how it works:

Placement 1 – three months in a retail branch
This gives you first-hand exposure at the sharp end of our business. It’s an invaluable scene-setting experience that:

• introduces you to the realities of the front line
• helps you understand the opportunities and challenges our frontline salespeople face
• lets you see how our products and services make a real difference to customers
• gives you unique insights into consumer behaviour
• helps you see Barclays through our customers’ eyes
• shows you how we position ourselves as a major high street retailer.

Placements 2 & 3 – in Marketing and Product teams
These two six-month placements, one in a Marketing and one in a Product team, will help you develop specialist skills in both areas. You’ll:

• discover how product concepts become reality
• listen to customers so you can design and refine products and communications that are both innovative and relevant
• start developing new and existing products
• find out what makes products commercial and how to translate these commercial objectives into marketing communications
• monitor the performance of products and communications once launched, and spot and maximise opportunities
• learn the most effective ways to influence our strategy
• influence the sales process to make sure we meet our targets
• build a thorough understanding of the essentials of banking, product management and marketing communications.

Placement 4 – in either Marketing or Product
Your final placement is where you’ll put all your newly acquired know-how into action. You’ll take responsibility for your own projects or products, controlling budgets and delivering measurable benefit to the business. You could find yourself:

• developing and launching a new product
• planning, managing and executing the marketing behind a new product launch
• exploring new market opportunities
• redefining our strategy within a certain sector
• making pricing decisions, including understanding the impact that macro-economic decisions (e.g. Bank of England base rate) have on our pricing model.

Whatever your specific role, you’ll have the chance to work with the wider retail bank, benefiting from exposure to senior retail leaders. You’ll develop a broad understanding of the economy and how it influences decisions. And you’ll increase your knowledge of financial services and how we compare with our competitors.

What’s more, you’ll gain a host of vital skills including:

in-house consultancy/ problem solving

project management

product development

marketing tools and techniques

internal and external communications

leadership

analytical – both technical and commercial

presentation

negotiation.