Placements

This is an opportunity for business to support university students to get as much out of their studies as they can and to have an opportunity to check out potential future employees; an extended interview if you like. It can also help you to develop links with universities that can be of use to your business in the future, carry out projects that would otherwise not be possible due to lack of resources and can even make you money through bringing in a fresh pair of eyes with up to date ideas that can help your business.

Placements can last from a few weeks to a full year, and can take in many areas of the business, including finance, marketing and IT as well as the more obvious technical areas. Students don’t need to be from your local university, so you can take advantage of specialist teaching from universities in various parts of the UK, or even beyond. You may also find that there are local young people that have decided to study at universities around the country who want to take advantage of having a local base to develop their work experience.

To help you get the most out of a work placement, NEPIC has the following tips

• Consider the area in which you want to have the student work and use this to choose the most appropriate level of student. You may decide to take an undergraduate, Masters student, Postgraduate, or possibly an MBA student.
• There are a number of placement schemes in operation, including university specific placement programmes, Year in Industry, Shell Step and others. NEPIC can help you to locate these schemes and to find the most appropriate for your business.
• It is better that you decide upon an appropriate project, rather than having a general work experience,  so that both the company and the student get the most benefit from their time together. This will help you to decide upon the most appropriate subject area and educational standard for you as well as allowing you to decide upon other resources that might be required.
• You should treat the recruitment of the student in a similar way to any other recruitment process. Specifying the role and interviewing, as well as taking up references will help to minimise the risk of you having someone that cannot deliver what you want, or that does not fit in your organisation
• Supervision when the student is in post is important. This might be an opportunity for you to identify someone in the organisation who is not normally in a supervisory position so and who could be given added responsibility. The supervisor should be knowledgeable, competent, and supportive of the student, but also someone who will help to push the project to deliver your needs and who will be firm with the student during what might be their only experience of the working world so far.
• You should consider the need for a confidentiality clause in your contract with the student, and possibly even a confidentiality agreement with the university to ensure that your competitive position is not compromised.
• Having the student prepare and present interim reports to your management team will help them to understand what you are getting from the student and also help them to develop their communication and interpersonal skills.
• Having a final project report and dissemination of the project is important so that the knowledge that you have paid to have developed does not disappear out of the door with the student. You might also want to consider a terminal bonus to provide an additional incentive for them to work hard.
• You might want to discuss with the student and their academic supervisors whether there is IP that you wish to protect, or maybe academic papers that could be jointly prepared and published.

You might decide to use a series of placement students to carry out a longer term project, such as development of software systems where testing is carried out between placements, where each student is able to build on the work of the previous one.

NEPIC gets enquiries from a number of students and universities each year for placement opportunities and we can help to put them in touch with appropriate businesses. We would be interested to hear from businesses that would be interested in taking part, so if this is of interest to your business, please get in touch with us at enquiries@nepic.co.uk.