Eager youngsters and recent graduates recently kicked off the CIBC FirstCaribbean summer internship programme and a new, longer immersion programme across the region.

Curtailed for the past two summers due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, the bank’s executives and staff were more than eager to welcome a total of 35 interns at their offices in Barbados, the Bahamas, Cayman Islands, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago for the six-week internship programme.

The interns, drawn mainly from The University of the West Indies campuses at Cave Hill, Mona, and St Augustine, are stationed across a number of segments including, digital and client experience, operations and infrastructure services, cloud infrastructure and architecture, enterprise security, data wealth and data science.

In addition to the summer internship programme the bank’s technology and corporate and investment banking segments welcomed 16 recent graduates and final year students of The University of the West Indies into its inaugural Technology Innovation Immersion Programme (TIIP), which will see 12 young graduates working in all areas of the bank’s technology department for the next 18 months while another four will rotate through corporate and investment banking for 12 months.

“We are delighted to once again welcome creative and talented young people to our bank as part of our summer internship programme and our new and very exciting TIIP. In addition to the valuable experience which these interns will gain, we as a bank also benefit tremendously from the imaginative and energetic perspectives that they bring to our operations,” said chief administrative officer, Neil Brennan.

He added that the bank, located in 15 territories across the English and Dutch Caribbean, was particularly proud of the TIIP, which is giving The UWI graduates the opportunity to gain “valuable and sustained work experience with our bank. The UWI is one of our treasured partners, and one of the first entities we signed a memorandum of understanding when the bank was formed back in 2002 and we are proud to continue to give these kinds of unique opportunities to their graduates.”

TIIP participant Cody Jones, a BSc computer science and accounting graduate of The UWI, Cave Hill, was impressed from week one with the orientation sessions which introduced participants to the various segments in the bank, describing it as “phenomenal”.

“It presented us with ample opportunities to network with fellow interns, to build lasting relationships that would flourish as we seek to contribute to the organisation together. We had the privilege to benefit from a pool of knowledge from across various sectors of the business, from risk and wealth management to corporate and investment banking,” he said.