Intern and insight programmes

Our internships provide an excellent platform for you to explore your career aspirations while delivering tangible benefits throughout our trading business. As one of the world’s most developed commodity trading businesses, our trading & shipping arm keeps the planet’s energy moving. With an extensive portfolio and expertise in physical supply and trading, bespoke financial structures, this part of bp helps around 12,000 customers make the most of their assets – all while offering people like you an excellent place to begin a rewarding career.

Alongside a unique opportunity to act as a key integrator of multi-energy solutions across bp, trading & shipping is perfectly placed to support the company’s journey to net zero whilst delivering distinctive competitive advantage. To do this, we’ll need to be constantly pursuing commercial opportunities. Optimizing our core businesses. Looking for new revenue streams. Striving for more innovative digital and customer solutions, as well as building closer collaboration across bp and beyond. Throughout, the deep expertise and leadership of our people will be key to helping us continue to be one of the world’s leading energy traders.

You’ll get involved in real projects and have a role of significant value, getting exposure to markets, deal making and stretch opportunities.
Beyond that, your internship will use online and virtual learning, leveraging classroom and on-the-job training to give you the building blocks of an amazing career. And you won’t be going it alone, you’ll have a buddy and mentor assigned to you, one who can help you navigate the organisation, give advice on your development and help you learn what it takes to achieve your goals.

Summer internship

This 12-week paid internship gives you the opportunity to gain real business experience in the summer before your final year. And this may lead to an offer of a place on one of our graduate programmes.

Our internships are designed for penultimate year students which means that when returning to university for your final year, you could have a graduate role lined up for the following year. Beyond this, you’ll have drive, innovative thinking, entrepreneurial spirit and the ability to get on well with colleagues.

The summer internship period lasts 12 weeks, from May to July each year.

Commercial

Trading operations

Trading operations is a commercial function responsible for providing deal management post-trader execution. It ensures that all contractual and operational requirements are fully met. Sitting alongside traders, the team manages the physical movements of oil and product cargos associated with the trades, and directly contributes to the financial performance of our business. The team manages commercial relationships with terminals, surveyors and charterers across the region, ensuring product quality optimization and quantity control. Internship projects would provide interns with the opportunity to work on continuous improvement projects that would expose them to the daily activities of our trading operations team.

Origination & strategy

An internship within these areas involves understanding the market related to a specific commodity or group of commodities through financial analysis and commercial research. There is a need to understand trade flows, market entry and exit points, review existing and future developments in key geographies in order for us to develop market strategies that would maximise commercial opportunities for our supply and trading business. Internship projects could be in areas of structured products marketing, fuels marketing or with our environmental products team.

Analytics

The analytics team use information flows and act as a subject matter expert for oil market fundamentals (including, but not limited to, refining margin and oil product yield drivers, supply outages, supply / demands, trade flows) that affect the refining and trading sectors. Joining analytics will enable you to learn how to drive common view product demands across the commodity benches. Support the monitoring of refinery data and creating useful and insightful analysis across global trading books. Internship projects in analytics would involve supporting analysis work for short to longer term market fundamentals for business origination and working closely with the bench analysts and traders.

Trading

Joining our energy trading team, you’ll be part of managing our trades on all of the major energy commodity exchanges and the OTC market as well as our daily exposure to global currency and interest rate fluctuations. You’ll have the opportunity to experience different trading disciplines and styles from physical trading to paper trading.

Finance & risk

Commodity Risk

Commodity Risk is a critical control and reporting function within finance and risk. It supports the effective management of trading profit and loss and our exposure related to a specific commodity or group of commodities. The team interfaces with the trading benches and management to deliver financial discipline, value-added reporting and risk frameworks. Internship projects in commodity risk would allow interns to build a good understanding of how trading exposure and risk management works in our industry.

Credit Risk

The trading and shipping credit risk provides independent risk oversight of the counterparty risks inherent in trading activities, as well as risk analytics and advice on deal structuring and risk mitigation to support the business. We deploy quantitative tools and techniques to assess and measure the credit risks and work very closely with the internal functions within bp and external parties to deliver commercial goals. Internship projects will involve areas of work around performing risk quantification, analysis / review, monitoring and reporting, and opportunities to participate in global and regional initiatives and projects.

12-month Trading and shipping internship

We’re offering talented students and recent graduates the opportunity to join our market analytics team as an intern for 12 months and be involved in delivering real-world energy solutions.

As an intern, you’ll help to transform what’s happening in geopolitical and market landscape into monetized trading opportunities. Through on-the-job experience, face-to-face and online learning, you’ll gain exposure to the data and methodology employed in analytics through working with traders and analysts in ship-tracking on one of our oil trading benches. You will learn more about our regional energy markets and the underlying fundamentals and take part in challenging development projects – while gaining insights into the pillars of trading fundamentals.

Rewards and benefits

Internship allowance
Networking opportunities
Personal development and training

Requirements

Smiling student using a tablet computer --- Image by © Wavebreak Media Ltd/Veer/Corbis

Penultimate year student (applicable only for Summer internship)
A passion for, and commitment to, responsible energy
Strong academic record in any degree discipline (bachelor’s or master’s degree)
Final year student (applicable only for 12-month Trading & Shipping internship)

How we do it

Now you know a little more about what we do, we’d like to take the opportunity to share some details around how we do it, and why our approach makes us stand out from the crowd.

A culture that has you in mind, always

At bp, we take great pride in our open and collaborative approach to commercialism, and the support we offer to our people as they use their drive, enthusiasm and entrepreneurial edge to contribute to our success. We’re also strong believers in equality and inclusion. It’s one of the reasons why we maintain a flat structure and have open trading floor plan – giving you access to colleagues from diverse backgrounds, with differing perspectives and levels of experience.

Develop today, thrive tomorrow

We take talent from diverse backgrounds who have an interest in financial markets and have the drive and aptitude to succeed. If you can bring a commercial focus, entrepreneurial mindset, curiosity and flexibility, our trading & shipping programme will connect you with some of the very best training and development in the industry. We’re talking responsibility from day one. Roles and projects that impact the bottom line. Field trips to refineries, ships, tank farms and beyond. A buddy scheme pairing you up with a current employee. And much, much more besides. If you’re looking to learn and grow your skills, there really is no better place to do so than with bp.

Doing well by doing right

We know that our success is directly linked to behaving ethically and looking after what matters most – our people. It’s why we’ve worked so hard to build trading & shipping into a welcoming environment where representation and inclusion are always top of mind. Where the mental health and well-being of every colleague is respected and safeguarded – both inside and out of work. Where employees have a voice – they’re actively encouraged to share their ideas while we listen. Where we play by the rules, striking deals in an ethical and responsible way. And where outreach programs help us give back to the diverse communities our employees represent. Put simply, this is trading with a purpose – and we all profit as a result.

Evolving you – and our business

Joining trading & shipping as a student or graduate is your opportunity to transform your future – and play an integral part in helping us do likewise. As previously mentioned, we’ve got ambitious plans to reinvent bp, starting with achieving net zero status across our operations by 2050 or sooner, and cutting the carbon intensity of the products we sell by 50% in the same timeframe. Alongside this, we’re increasing the proportion of investment we make into non-oil and gas business. For you, that means developing your skills during a pivotal moment of our history and applying your talents to high profile initiatives set to redefine our role within the energy industry. Make a success of it, and there’s no telling how far you could go within bp after you complete your programme.

Delve deeper

Interactive trading up game

Test your ability to analyze, anticipate and react quickly. Learn how to make the right decisions whilst optimizing your profits.

Play the game

Energy markets

bp’s Statistical Review of World Energy 2022 reveals that the growing shortages and increasing prices highlight the continuing importance of energy ‘security’ and ‘affordability’ alongside ‘lower carbon’ when addressing the energy trilemma

Find out more