Industrial placement Year

[quintessentially166]

When DS applied to Uni the idea of a placement year sounded a good option, however, naively I thought the Uni had a list of placements and you picked an option, have a basic interview to check you were right fit…but no, it is literally like applying for a full time job, having to source the placement yourself and with up to 4 rounds of interviews and that is only if you get passed just submitting your CV.

What is your DS/DD experiences of trying to get a placement like? Did they manage to find something or did they just have to go on and complete their final year without a placement year?

I'd defo check what the conversion rate of placement year to grad job offers. The one my DD did in 2024 offered 2 out of around 50 jobs. My DD didn't mess up but just wasn't good enough to be top two (had to go thru 3 stages at end of placement to apply) so quite brutal.

The other issue is that if it’s your 20th option and isn’t where you want to be or really what you want, how valuable is it? Great if it’s what you dreamed of but there’s other jobs out there with firms who don’t offer a year to non grads. With apprenticeships, firms aren’t taking on loads of under 21s and spending time training them all. Whether these are good jobs offering full training for, eg CEng, is another issue. Grad jobs aren’t all of the same quality. Some won’t lead to professional qualifications at all. They just employ grads with little planned career progression.

@OhDear111 that's a very pessimistic way to look at it?

What would you suggest kids do if placement years aren't all fabulous and grad schemes are so patchy?

FWIW I think recruitment processes are so much tougher than when we all went through this. Am sure proud that ds persevered and got a placement that he is interested in (he didn't apply to any that he felt uninterested in for the record).

If he gets a grad job offer then accepting it would be sensible. It'll take the pressure out of his final year and will mean he has a concrete first step on the career ladder planned.

Have no idea what the career progression looks like. My main thing is for him to be doing something he enjoys in a sector he's interested in. He's not going to spend his whole career there.......

@Charlotte120221 You are writing about Bath. For an MEng course and one with the best track records for placements. They really is like comparing apples to pears. Bath being no 1 for this type of degree. Other universities are nowhere near Bath in this respect. What do you think all the disappointed dc should do? I don’t know because I think too many courses say they offer a year but reality is different. So what about those who fail to get anything? How do they fell? Useless and short changed probably?

Placements don’t all lead to job offers either. Employers do know there are other grads out there. Probably Bath placements do lead to jobs but that’s not universal as others have said. The wider world is different.

I'm with you @Charlotte120221

For my DS, doing a placement is giving him the a year-long opportunity to see if the sector/profession he's been targeting for the last couple of years, is actually what he want's to do for a career.

If not, then he'll rethink and apply for a different type of grad post, albeit with the benefits of:

1. having been through similar recruitment processes once already
2. a year's worth of industry/professional experience, and the maturity that brings.

And, if he's fortunate enough to be offered a graduate post by his placement company, that will be great. It doesn't mean he's tied to them, but it does relieve him of some of the pressure current/prospective graduates are/will be facing to gain employment.

This is exactly what happened to DD2 @cyclingmum67! She did a STEM degree which pointed down a particular career path but did that job during her industry year and found it quite dull and repetitive, and not terribly challenging.

She then went back and worked very hard in her final year in order to gain a place on a prestigious Masters course which she loved and which took into frontline research.

So learning what you don't want to do can be as helpful as learning what you might want to...

@thing47Thats quite a luxury though as it adds a year to the degree. What’s dd doing now with her new found career direction?

Why is it a luxury? You pay minimal tuition fees during your placement year and are getting paid/don't need any maintenance loan in the majority of cases.

It's 1 additional year on top of what will probably be a 35-40 year long career

Trust me, that didn't happen in all Polytechnics! Even in my time early 90s, the Poly I went to did absolutely nothing. Which is the reason I was right on the ball when it came to my DC.

@cyclingmum67 It can add a lot in accommodation costs, not being with friends when you return to university and you delay earning a graduate wage by one year so lose out financially. Few placements pay enough to rent a place and use transport to work and live. Parents still support - eg with buying a car.

You might also lose out on the MEng course if you do BEng with a placement thus limiting your career choices and options. Most people think studying the same thing for 5 years, even if there’s some pay involved, is a long time. They might rather do a masters within the 4 years, not a year’s placement. All of this needs consideration. It’s not black and white.

Im not saying all (former) polys were good at placements although @thing47 DD was at one I believe. They did, however, pioneer placements because their degrees were more work based. They were set up to offer skills based courses that traditional universities didn’t routinely offer. As in most things, some were great and others not so good. Location, state of economy and leadership in industry and the poly all made a difference to these programmes, and still do.

@OhDear111- completely agree its not black and white - so many differing circumstances for different YP. However, I'd still disagree it's a luxury for most.

FWIW, DS applied for Finance positions all over the UK - about 20 in total. Every one, without fail, was offering salary just a little lower than their graduate entry potions.

He ended up in London where he's in a 5 bed houseshare with a monthly rent that is exactly the same as his 2nd year rent in Exeter. He's definitely not worse off.

We’ve been to about 6 engineering uni visits over the last 4-5 months. Every one of them has made it very clear in their presentations that the year in industry option is not guaranteed, that students have to apply for this and the companies will decide who they take on or not. They are all good universities and all said that “most” students who want to find a placement will manage to do so, and they describe what they can do to help. Some unis have a lot more support than others. But they’ve definitely emphasised it’s down to the students to source and be successful.

The “offer” from the uni is to allow students to disappear for a year in the middle of their degree, and pick it up a year later. With some “checking they’re not being exploited”, continued access to uni accounts and materials, check ins, and varying support finding and applying for placements.

Hmm. Is “most” 60%? No quantity.

Plus @Talipesmum its then a choice about actually doing 5 years for MEng against 4 for MEng and still getting a decent job afterwards as “most” non placement year students do, and that is quantified. Engineers must understand the difference between BEng and MEng if they want to actually be Chartered Engineers. They also need to understand not all employers support dc becoming Chartered in a timely fashion and some will hardly support engineers to become Chartered at all. They just want the work out of them with minimal post grad training that meets Cgsrtered requirements. Dc applying early in their university careers often don’t understand this but it matters.

So be very careful about quality of employer and they certainly do not all pay just below grad engineer rate. That’s a moveable feast too! DH has just sold his engineering consultancy employing 120 staff so I do have some understanding of this over 40 years.

I filter CVs and interview for industrial placements in my company every year and can confirm it has become extremely competitive in my field. Students need to be self driven to both source the placement and to deal with the application process in itself. I reject for minor issues such as typos and late responses because we have have such a vast pool to choose from. CVs which stand out show consistently good grades back to GCSE level and relevant work experience. Also a genuine enthusiasm to work in the field after graduating. We have very little contact with Universities before or during the placement year.

Yes, it’s completely clear about the effect on course length if an MEng student also adds a placement year.

I just don’t see the need to get cross about it. All I’m saying is that for all the engineering info talks we’ve been to at a lot of unis, none of this has been misleading. It’s all been entirely clear, they’ve talked about employability with and without a placement, students with placements and without placements have talked about their experiences. None of the “reveals” on this thread are anything we haven’t learnt from talking to the unis about placements.

Anyone going into this thinking “my student will get given a placement and all will be great and straightforward” is woefully naive, but there’s been nothing at the open days to give that impression.

I’ve been thinking again. The reality of placement years has been made completely clear on all the open days we’ve visited, and the departments have been great at answering questions about how hard it is to get a placement, how many want to but can’t etc.

But I think it’s fair to say that the websites for some of these courses aren’t equally open about this. I’ve just been back to check a few of the websites for the courses we’ve been looking at, and if all people are able to do is look at the short website descriptions, I can quite see how people would think that placements were offered in a straightforward routine way. The level of immediate open discussion about this being a challenge with students having to find and successfully apply for their own placements, which we’ve found at all open days, is harder to find, and in a few cases entirely absent. And yes, we’ve been fortunate to be able to travel to quite a few, not everyone can do this.

So I revise my opinion a bit. I’ve found it wholly clear from open days, but recognising that if people can’t attend them, and don’t specifically reach out to the unis to ask (which likely they’ll only do if they’re already aware it might not be straightforward), it could well be misleading.

A friend's DD met her now boyfriend on her placement year. He was/is a FT employee there. The DD works elsewhere but she met her partner through that.

@TalipesmumI think you’ve seen what the problem is. Not everyone can attend numerous open days and, to be honest, should not have to. Some people simply don’t have the money for this and rely on prospectus info. I do think clarity for all prospective students is vital.

Yes, it’s a very fair point. I do think that this, amongst many other things that are much better clarified in person, emphasises the importance of attending at least one open day and asking lots and lots of questions. We had a far better idea of the reality of the entire course - not just the industrial placement part - after just the first open day, and it really taught us what questions to ask, what to find out about. Even if it isn’t the open day for your ideal university, going to just one and asking a lot of questions is a big step up from none, and if that’s all that can be done in person, other courses can be contacted for more info.

My son was the same. No,he got minimal help to source a placement. I also thought the Uni would provide some places they had used previously. And this is a good RG Uni. He got help with his cv and a bit of interview guidance and that was it. He applied for about 6 placements and literally heard nothing back despite being on track for a 1st and the Uni supporting this. Admittedly he did tie himself to a particular area of England due to signing a contact for this years house for another year. Having said that, not to hear anything at all seems poor. He did say a lot of tge people who got placements seemed to have connections with tge company they got a placement at in tge first place.

He’s just gone into his third year and now looking at full time jobs. He’s doing computer science if that changes anything?

@Talipesmum I’m not cross and apologies if it came across like that but there are a lot of students with minimal ability to ask the right questions because they don’t know they have to. It’s ok for MN parents to be switched on and maybe less trusting of a prospectus, but others do believe what they read and surely that’s reasonable too? They should be reading a truthful and accurate summary of what to expect, as they do for the academic years.

Yes, I agree with this, and with your earlier point about it not being black and white and that there are a number of factors to consider.

In DD2's case she obviously.went into her placement year hoping the experience would stand her in good stead for a graduate career, that would have been the primary objective. As a kind of secondary benefit, though, it was probably helpful to realise she needed to change direction a little, and that knowledge informed her choice of final year dissertation.

You're right, she went to a mid-rank former poly for her undergraduate. I would describe their approach to placements as supportive and encouraging but not particularly proactive.

As to your question she did her Masters study at a world-leading (for her subject) specialist institution which - without being too outing - enabled her to get into frontline field and lab research into vector-borne diseases.

Hi. Thanks for this info. The “relevant work experience” - how does this manifest? Is your industry easy to get work experience in? Reason I ask is my dd didn’t have a placement year and when looking for a job following graduation kept hitting the lack of actual
work experience as a barrier. My ds can do a placement year so he can get work experience - and thus we then hope getting a job post graduation would be easier. So how does a 2nd year have work experience? It’s quite frustrating as they both have worked but just not in the sort of areas they are interested in or have formal work experience.

@bestbefore- re the "relevant work experience" question, my DS did 2 separate stints of week long, unpaid work-experiences at local accounting and finance firms - all small ones - in his easter and summer break. He arranged this himself by emailing them directly with a relevant covering letter and CV.

Whilst these helped him answer some questions on the Industrial Placement application forms, for those he actually reached interview stage with (about 5 from 20) he said the interviewers were more interested in his part time work roles (supermarket an sports store) that he'd been doing on/off since he was 16, focusing on dealing with customers and solving problems

@cyclingmum67 This wholly depends on industry and company though. My DH ran a consulting civil and structural engineering company for 40 years plus. They could not care less about anyone working at Tesco. The young grads didn’t meet the clients! Let alone anyone on a placement year. They needed Engineering design nous and to be quick learners. They want problem solvers, but engineering problems. Not how to return a bruised apple.

@bestbefore what was/is your DS looking for? What might he find over the summer as relevant experience? Where could he look? Lots of small companies just put summer placements on their web sites. Is volunteering possible?