My journey with BNP Paribas The Netherlands, started in January 2023. For those who don’t know, BNP Paribas The Netherlands is the Dutch subsidiary company of BNP Paribas Group, a French international bank. Before the start of my internship, I was afraid of what was ahead of me. Indeed, I was worried about discovering the financial and banking world, which on top of being a complex and unknown field to me, is a field that has a heavy corporate culture.
However, after interning for six months at the bank, I became less and less intimated by the environment that I was evolving in, got to boost my skills in Corporate and Strategic Communications, and of course, made a lot of meaningful work connections that I hope to keep in the future.
In this way, what my internship has taught me is twofold. On the one hand, I feel like I had the opportunity to learn how to behave in such corporate settings. I learned how to communicate with colleagues effectively, witnessed and participate in office politics, and merely learned how to dress to fit in this environment. On the other hand, since I was evolving inside a small team among specialists in very different aspects of Marketing and Communications, my internship let me get acquainted with each of my colleagues’ specializations. These included External & Internal Communications, Event Management, CSR, and Marketing with the more general strategy of the company in the Netherlands. I was able to participate in projects in each of these areas. For instance, I worked on email newsletters but also filmed and edited videos for internal engagement, got to design a part of the external website, helped with the management and recruitment of participants for CSR activities, helped with the management of events on-location, and even drafted a little speech for the CEO of the branch.
All in all, my internship taught me a lot about all things Corporate Communications. Nonetheless, the biggest takeaway from this internship is that it taught me a lot about managing people’s expectations and managing my own time and workload. Being in such a small team for such a critical branch implied many responsibilities and direct exchanges with different people from different services, which required having a specific work discipline that I got more and more used to. The diversity of the tasks, which taught me so much, and the fact that I had a very supportive team around me, can only make me recommend this internship to others, as long as they have a strong interest in Corporate Communications.
I was involved in several projects on Sustainability and CSR, and Employee Branding was an essential topic during my time at BNP; I conducted qualitative research by interviewing current employees. I am still in the process of analyzing the data as of now but what I can say already is that Sustainability and CSR activities are indeed crucial for employees but that other factors, such as the general working conditions and, of course, financial compensation, are even more important key drivers for employees when accepting a position, especially during uncertain times with a rising of the general living costs.
As a result, BNP Paribas should still invest in CSR and Sustainability to attract employees but should not underestimate more fundamental factors. Also, the results of my research could significantly improve the Communications of BNP Paribas The Netherlands as my research helped to know more about employees’ preferences, and employees themselves made many suggestions to improve the different Communications around these topics.