Darren
Graduate IT Programme
Loading..
Find out what working here is really like- in the words of our current graduates. Darren joined our IT graduate scheme a couple of years ago and after enjoying several placements around the business talks about his role in E.ON Energy Trading. He talks about his experience in this video, or you can read the transcript below.
"Hi. My name's Darren. I currently work for E.ON and I'm an Application Support Analyst.
I initially joined E.ON as a graduate on their graduate scheme in 2007. The scheme is structured in a way where you start in the business and it's divided up into placements, so there's four different placements that you do. There's many different businesses within E.ON and actually coming in on the graduate scheme, you can go from one area to another and get an appreciation for E.ON as a whole. When I was on the scheme I didn't do any two roles that where the same, each one was vastly different from the next.
At the moment my role is basically working for E.ON Energy Trading. They basically trade different commodities, so electricity, gas, fuel, so coal that kind of thing, and they have a lot of different IT systems that need supporting and I do those on a 24/7 basis. It's quite an important role in the sense that we have to make sure these systems are running, otherwise at the end of the day the business can lose a fair amount of money. We do project work, so not only the reactive side of things - fixing things when they go wrong, but actually making sure we can improve these things so they go wrong less essentially. It means that we can trade as one of the leading trading organisations in the energy industry.
As part of the company they encourage us to do a lot of green travel. Getting in by bus, getting in by car, coming in by cycling, whatever way you want to turn up really, but the emphasis really is on getting here in a green fashion so reducing your CO2.
On the graduate scheme, when you're learning there's a lot of people there to give you a hand and help you through. Basically as soon as you start you're always going to get a line manager, a mentor and also a buddy who is normally a graduate from the previous year. The mentoring really helped. You can actually call up your mentor and use them as a sounding board, bounce ideas off them.
The team I work with are a really nice bunch of individuals. There's a lot of knowledge in the team. This is a new area I work in. I've never had any experience doing application support before, and through the team they've actually helped me understand different areas and how important key systems can be.
E.ON stuck out to me purely because being a graduate and leaving university, the levels of training and the types of work you can get involved in really appealed to me. Having a read through their website you can see the different sorts of areas you might be able to get into and the fact that there were lots of different schemes.
For those people thinking of joining, I can firmly recommend it, whether it's on the graduate scheme, like the route I took or if you're coming in as professional. There's lots of different objectives that have been set for the company, and by joining you feel like you're helping them to achieve those. Well I've got to get back to work. Part of my monthly reboots, I have to go and deal with all of those. So, see you."
