JESSICA CRAWFORD

I heard about BAE Systems from a family friend and he told me to look on the website and look into the company.  So I did, and the more I read about it the more interesting it seemed so I applied to do a nine month work placement in Glascoed in Wales for Global Combat Systems just to get a taste of accounting and see what it was like.  So I did that and then the more people I met and the more graduates I met that worked there, I just fell in love with the company and knew that I wanted to work there.

One of the best parts of working for BAE Systems is they really encourage you to move around so you get to, not only see different business units but you also get to travel around the country.  They also have opportunities abroad, which is a real bonus of the scheme so you could be in Farnborough one year, Warton the next and in Bournemouth another.  You could go to Australia, Sweden, even America and Canada.  They’ve got people all over the world.

One of the main benefits of being on the Finance Leader Development Programme is they have a really comprehensive study package with CIMA, which is the Chartered Institute of Management Accounting so they not only pay for all of your training, but you get all the time out of the office for the taught courses, the revision course and the exams so it’s a really well supported programme.

One of the biggest challenges of being on this graduate programme is balancing your daily work with your studying because the studying is almost a priority in some respects.  But because you get really involved in your day job and you become part of the team and you really want to spend your time doing your job, when it comes to taking time out of the office to do the courses, sometimes that’s really hard and you have to be able to sometimes sacrifice your social life to be able to revise and make sure that you do well in your exams.

I knew that it wouldn’t be a normal desk job scenario because a lot of the sites are where they build the products that we make, which are anything from aircrafts to vehicles and munitions.  When I started working at Warton on the airfield, we had the aircraft taking off outside our window so we got to see the Typhoon and the Hawk on a daily basis, and within a few weeks of working there they’d set up a site tour for us and we actually got to sit in the Hawk and the Tornado, which was just an amazing experience.