Graduate training programmes and industrial placements

Hi, I'm Lauren, I'm 22 and I'm from Northwest London. I recently graduated from Loughborough University with a first-class honors degree in human biology. During my third year of university I completed a placement year at Haleon working in regulatory affairs for the Great Bristan and Ireland local market.

I loved my year in industry, so following that, my intention was to apply for a graduate scheme in a pharmaceutical company. Because of my academic background I've also always been interested in medicines and patient-focused work.  Having a graduate scheme is such an amazing and exciting opportunity to get experience across different areas of the business so early on in your career because you don't always get this opportunity to try several different roles in such a short space of time. It's also great to help identify preferences and strengths in different roles which will help guide future career decisions and allow me to have a broad understanding of the business that I can take forward into future roles.

I'm part of ABBVie's Early Talent Commercial Graduate Scheme, which is a three-year programme, with three different rotations across business excellence, marketing and field sales, and I'm currently two months into my first rotation within the Business Excellence team.

So, there's sorts of two parts to my role. The first part is I assist the country training manager with creating and distributing training modules to the sales team and then I also work with our data analysts by extracting sales data from large data sets, analyzing the data, creating pivot tables, and then providing actionable insights to the sales team and to various other stakeholders.

So, I aim to remain in the pharmaceutical industry and hope this programme will clarify the role best suited to me, but I'm also open to exploring new roles within the industry to broaden my understanding of the business progress in my career and further my personal and professional development.