On the Barclays’ graduate programme, Barbara was able to gain exposure to various business areas within the bank

I started at Barclays in June 2014 as a Rotational Analyst within Internal Audit. I worked in different teams which allowed me to get exposure to various business areas at Barclays such as Wealth, Compliance, Finance, and Banking. Currently I work with the Corporate and Investment Banking Division, Banking and Research team within Internal Audit and was promoted to Assistant Vice President in May 2017.

Whenever there is a big project or regulatory change, Internal Audit is typically involved to review the new pieces and to look at how the businesses are going to adapt the changes. My day-to-day responsibilities consist of working with my colleagues in audit and the businesses to review their controls and processes.

My work ranges from completing testing of controls in an audit, internal reporting, writing up a work paper, or doing a walkthrough with clients to understand how they complete their day-to-day jobs with the right controls and risk in mind.

Being just three years into my career and getting to meet and present to the CEO was pretty cool.

One of the most challenging aspects of my job is giving the difficult message to clients that we have identified audit issues as part of a review. But I’ve learned that keeping a positive attitude, being proactive, and getting our clients involved early always helps.

Beyond my day job, I’m the Global Co-Chair of Emerge, Barclays’ multigenerational employee networking group, which I was asked to help start up after only six months at the company. The people I’ve met and the experience I have gotten through Emerge have been awesome. I have been able to form relationships with colleagues across the bank in different business areas. This has showed me all of the cool programs the bank runs that I didn’t even know existed, and it has helped me with my client relationships when it comes to my audit work as well. Previously my global co-chair and I emailed former CEO, Jes Staley to voice our support of one of the initiatives he launched, telling him how it aligned with the goals of our network. Jes replied within minutes saying he wanted to meet with us to see how he could get involved with the network and the millennial generation at Barclays. Being just three years into my career and getting to meet and present to the former CEO was pretty cool