Hi,Some of you may remember my post regarding placements in an Insurnace firm and Kantar Worldpanel.I actually ended up getting an offer for Kantar only, in Client Reporting. This will be for a year only, after which I will be returning to University to complete my 3rd year, hopefully gained a 2:1/1st in Economics. Someone suggested that not all experience is good experience and that you can end up limiting yourself. Is it possible I'm making it more difficult for myself to get into consultancy with this year placement? Options are, get this year experience with Kantar in Client Reporting (i.e with clients such as coca cola, loreal, etc) or graduate with no real notable work experience. The role will pretty much revolve excel work and creating reports on big clients; repetitive stuff. Thank youJ

any experience will be useful, directly relevant experience like this much more so. You'll spend your early consulting career creating reports and modeling in excel anyway. You can expect plenty more repetitive stuff before you win your spurs and start doing something meaningful. When you come to start your career it wont matter too much what you did on a daily basis at Kantar (although it cant hurt) but rather than you got the job and gained a year's experience of shining your shoes, getting up every morning, and remembering who wanted the mocha extra shot with hazelnut syrup and who wanted the expresso with just the tiniest dab of foam.

The answer to your core question is, I think, that this can only be a good thing from a recruitment perspective.The broader question is how much you can make of it. Marsday is correct to point out that even the process of learning about how an organisation like this works will be beneficial. However, I think that there is an opportunity to get far more out of it. So be 100% proactive and see if you can already start moving beyond the report creation. Could you improve the reports? Maybe start interpreting the data? Get involved in something else in the office (classically campus recruitment)? Elect for additional training sessions? Take a qualification in your spare time (and explore if HR will fund it)?Having worked in a similar atmosphere I can assure you these opportunities might well exist if you create them. Most managers love individuals who spot opportunities to add value and even those that do not rarely want to shoot you down. Then, at the end, hey presto you have a great opportunity to tell a story about how you developed your role.