Hopefully some of the options we gave you in the last section will have helped you narrow down what you want to do. This time we will provide you with some sources you will need to find more information about various industries and ultimately who has vacancies available.

Information resources…

Anyone for some shameless self promotion? Why not… www.RateMyPlacement.co.uk first of all. We have over 1,000 student reviews written about placements and internships from over 450 companies. Find out what your peers are saying about their own experiences. We also have advice and industry specific information.

Next stop has got to be your careers service or placements office, both online and offline. They will have all the information about careers fairs and presentations, bags full of brochures and magazines and of course years of experience. Go and visit them, or at least call them, to see if they can help. It is a good starting point.

Here’s some other useful website to help you with your research…

1. WikiJob.co.uk – has a great forum and industry specific information. Although it is mainly graduate focused, there is some information on placements and work experience, read and contribute
2. The Student Room – is also a very active community with all sorts of discussion, careers being one.  
3. HereComesTheBoss – if you are bored of reading all your information, why not watch their extensive video content. We recommend Hanson TV – always good for a laugh.
4. Benedix – if you are after a job in Banking and Finance look out for the advice sections of Benedix, and also find out about the training days they run.
5. Realworld Magazine – for information about jobs and careers.

Job vacancies…

As you may have noticed there aren’t many websites that give information on just placements and internships, and we are one of that small number. We are obviously aiming to be the number one resource for placement and internships, and although we believe we’re pretty damn good, there’s a few other websites out there that you may want to check out.

1. Us again! RateMyPlacement.co.uk – We focus on work placements and internships. Jobs are listed on our job board. Click here for full listings
2. InternOptions – For students wanting to work in Australia or New Zealand.
3. Shell STEP – For summer internship schemes at SMEs (Small to Medium Sized Enterprises).
4. IST Plus – For placements and internships in the USA, Canada and abroad.

Your Careers and Placements service at your university is also a key place to look – Many will be password protected but hopefully you should have access to them, they will have job vacancies listed.

Speculative Applications…

Know of a company that you think you’d like to work for? Go for it! We know of quite a few plucky students who have managed to persuade a company that they can offer a great deal and have secured themselves a job. You’ve got absolutely nothing to lose in speculatively applying to a company that takes your interest – you should be able to find some contact details via their website. Send off a CV and Cover Letter explaining not only what you could bring to the company, but the benefits of hiring a student and you never know…

Once you have searched all the available work placement and internship vacancies, hopefully a few should have that have caught your eye. Make sure you know when their deadlines are, it would a massive waste of time to do all the applications just to find out the deadline was the 21st January rather than the 21st of February. After that, make sure you look at the company websites, find out exactly what roles the company has and in which locations. Ask your careers service whether they know about the company and they may even be able to point you towards a student who has worked there before. Ensure you check our student reviews as we are most likely to have a personal account from someone who has had first-hand experience working with the company.

Have you ever wanted to throw something at the RateMyPlacement team? I know we certainly have, or do you just fancy a Christmas gift on our behalf… Anyway, because we are feeling particularly festive, we have launched our winter game where you get to pelt the members of the RateMyPlacement team with snowballs. Whoever does it best and scores the most points stands to win some pretty good stuff.

The person who is top of our leader board at 9.00pm on the 20th January will have the choice of an iPod touch, or 4 tickets for Spring Break UK to Mallorca in March (you have to be a student to win the tickets). However that’s not all, as we don’t want anyone feeling left out, we are giving everyone who leaves their email address £25 off orders with Spabreaks.com. That should help you get over the January blues.

Click here to play the game…

If you want to find out more about the game and the prizes on offer, read our T&Cs for more information. Happy throwing.

This is where it is really down to you. There is only so much information we can give to you, as ultimately only you can decide what you want to do… This said, there are plenty of choices out there, some lesser known than others, and I certainly wish I knew about some of these when I was looking for my job.

Here is an overview, the decision is yours!

Placement vs Internship (or both)

This decision may be one of the few that is (pretty much) out of your hands. If your university or course offers a year out, then this may be the best option for you. If you can’t do a placement as part of your degree, then the Internship during a holiday is definitely one of the better bets. If you are keen, like me, then I would definitely recommend doing both. I was in the City working for the Bank of England, only a few hundred yards from the investment banks, so I figured why not apply for them too? I used my holiday entitlement to take the interviews but as they were so close I went back to the office afterwards. When I got offered a place at Deutsche Bank I was already living in London so all I had to do was stay in the house I was renting anyway. It was definitely the best thing I did on my placement as I got to see two very different jobs and did 2 different roles (one which I liked and one which I didn’t) and it certainly meant I had much better idea of what I wanted to do in life.

UK vs Abroad All the members of the RateMyPlacement team went along with probably 99% of students and worked in the UK, and we had very little idea that you could work abroad on your placement year. There are plenty of opportunities in Europe (especially if you want to learn a language), and the USA and Canada, Australasia and many more, it’s just a case of finding them!

Large Company vs Small Company

Do you want to be one of 200 placement students / interns, or do you want to know everybody in the company? Do you want to work in a modern office with IT support a phone call away or do you want to work directly with the MD of the business? Working in a small company is something we had really never considered before, however now we run a small company of our own, I think it may have been the one thing I would have changed about my placement. Below are the advantages and disadvantages of working in a big company vs working for a small company.

Small Company

Advantages:

1. You work alongside the most senior people in the business
2. Your work has a real impact on the business as a whole
3. You are given real responsibility
4. You may have the ability to change the direction of the business
5. It may be a great way to become more entrepreneurial
6. You will know everyone in the business

Disadvantages:

1. You may be the only placement student
2. Chances are the wages will not be as high
3. You may not have the infrastructure and support that a big company offers.
4. If you don’t get along with a member of staff, you may not be able to move within the firm

Large Company

Advantages:

1. You will have all the perks, and support that big companies offer, this may be everything from gyms to a buddy / mentor scheme.
2. You may be able to take advantage of the company’s resources to make a real impact.
3. There will probably be a lot of young people around the office, and networks where you can meet them.
4. You will probably earn a higher wage
5. This may be the start of a long career with real progression
6. The business may be very high profile and in the news.
7. There may be a lot of kudos attached to working for the company

Disadvantages:

1. The work you do may not have a direct impact on the success of the firm
2. The work may be more repetitive and structured.
3. You may feel more anonymous

 

Hello guys,

You join me again and guess what it is nearly CHRISTMAS!! Oh what joy it will be to have a marvellous two weeks off and enjoy festive spirit, hopefully everyone will bring it back to work and people will cheerful once again. Anyway back to how things are here at Outokumpu Stainless, things have started to slow down in the run up of Christmas which in my eyes is both good and bad. Is trade slowing because of the economic climate or does this happen every year due to the festivities, but all is well we can enjoy the secret santa’s and the xmas due’s. I have now completed 5 months of my work placement and I personally think I have come along well and have matured become more of a gent on my work placement. From the days of thinking steal was just a shiny piece of metal to …. going to see a multi-million pound company and selling them pro’s of stainless steel. I think that is a vast improvement!

I was awaiting in the last blog my customer visit, well that all went very smoothly a nice little trip to Halifax in a nice big Mercedes ( I am up and coming in this world ) It was quite funny as it is was the first time I had drove the Mercedes company car and released there was no handbrake?? So after ten minutes of sat there like a numpty I found the handbrake which had been transformed into the shape of a button on the dashboard… oh the ease! The customer visit was at a textile company called James .H. Heal, I was quite nervous at first of the prospect of talking about millions of pounds. But once I arrived my nerves seemed to disappear as I realised they are just normal people doing there job like I was doing mine, I think it hit me within this meeting that I had matured a lot in my time of work placement as I no longer act/think like a student ( hopefully will come flooding back in 7 months!!).

I’ll leave now and run along to Christmas times, we find out after the festivities who will be made redundant bad times. But this is the world of business and things like this happen and we have to get along.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

Peace out!

Find out what our Guest Bloggers are getting up to. Throughtout the year we will be following the progress of our Guest Bloggers as they find a placement or keep us updated as to what they are doing on their placement. Click here to read all entries from our bloggers or click here to meet them.

Phil’s Entry

After completing my first assessment centre, I now feel that I am truly on the way to getting a placement. The coach journey there was an absolute killer (delays left, right and centre), but I pressed on through the day and came out the other side with just enough energy to make it home The interviews (there were two) were much more casual than I had expected, which was a relief. The only advice I can offer is to relax, be yourself and be honest when you don’t know an answer: floundering looks so much worse! The questions were competency-based, on the same lines as the ones I’ve been answering for online applications. For example, “describe a situation where there was conflict within a team you were part of, and how you resolved this.” It’s quite easy to prepare for these kind of questions, as there are so many examples available online.

There was also a group exercise, which involved the construction of Lego towers in a small group, given a specific set of requirements. My course has given me a lot of preparation for this kind of exercise, so I think it went well for me. The most important thing to remember is that you are not judged on the outcome, but on how you arrived there. Unless you start arguing and throwing bricks at each other, I really can’t see any way to fail this task

Finally, there was an individual written exercise: to plan an event based on a set of memos provided. There really is no ‘right’ way to approach this, so there’s very little advice I can give. All I can say is try to keep track of time, and plan everything. There is plenty more advice on the RateMyPlacement site, so check it out.

Overall, everyone seemed really encouraging, and the current students really rated it there. If they offered me a job tomorrow I’d probably take it, but even if I’m not successful it feels like a worthwhile experience.

So it’s almost the Christmas break, the coursework deadlines have been and gone there’s exams coming up in January to revise for. As well as catching up with your friends and families, for many, the search for a 2009 work placement or internship continues over the holidays!

Fear not, RateMyPlacement.co.uk is here to help. Alongside the 1,000+ reviews and the largest online database of placement and internship vacancies, we’ve got some cracking advice, tips and features to help you secure your perfect job.

We’ve got CV advice and templates to help you make the right start, and Assessment Centre/Interview advice to ensure you know what to expect and to prepare for.

We’ve also got a range of Company Features, to provide you with a further insight into what you can expect when working for a particular company.

Click here to enter our Advice and Features section.

OK, so now you know vaguely what a placement or internship is, why should you bother doing it, or even considering it any further? Well, we don’t want to preach to you but there are a lot of advantages to it, and don’t just take our word for it, we have invited a few guests to talk about why they think you should get work experience…

The RateMyPlacement Team

1) Work experience gives an edge in the job market… Nowadays, you need more than just a good degree to get a job.  Every year around 160,000 students leave university with a 1st or 2.1 which means you have a lot of competition for your graduate job, especially given the current economic downturn. So how can you differentiate yourself? Get some work experience and don’t end up at the Job Centre!

2) You will learn things that you can never learn at university…

What do you learn at uni? For the most part it is academic theory, you may also learn that 3 nights out on the spin will severely hurt your head and bank balance. However what you don’t learn is how to interact with a colleague, a boss, a client, or even managing a team. On a placement or internship, however, you will have a better understanding of all these things, and much much more.

3) It will help you get your ideal job…

A placement or internship helps every part of your bid to secure a graduate job. You will practise writing a CV / application, then you experience interviews and assessment days and you learn how to handle yourself in the work place. Then after your placement or internship it goes full circle again, your CV has more on it, you have more to talk about in interviews and you won’t make those silly mistakes you made first time around in the office.

4) You will earn some money… How many jobs will you have as a student that will pay the equivalent of £15k, £20k or even as much as £35k per year? If you want to, you can earn and save good money on a placement or internship which will really help you during term time or help pay off your loan. Don’t forget though, it’s not all about money… You may be better off in the long run to get a job you are actually interested in rather than take the job that earns a few extra pounds.

5) You will learn what you do, or don’t want from a job…

There will be some great bits about your work experience, and there may well be some horrendous parts to it too; you may find out you love working with people, or might not be able to think of anything worse than a client moaning at you all the time. You may have thought you could handle 12 hour days, but actually not seeing friends for 4 months isn’t so appealing anymore. A placement is only for a year, and an internship is only for a few months, so you would much rather find out what you want now, rather than spending hours applying for the graduate job, and being stuck in it for 2 years, before you realised it isn’t actually the job for you…

Right first things first, what are placements and internships and what is the difference between them…?

Well here goes… placements, industrial placements, summer placements, internships, sandwich years and summer internships are all fairly similar and often interchangeable terms, however, in general:

Placements / sandwich year…

…are usually around 12 months and are in what would be your 3rd year of university. They are usually offered as part of your degree and hopefully you should know that you have to do one, or at least have the option. There are around 120,000 students per year who do placements and many large and small employers will offer placements to students. Many of the larger companies with placement schemes have deadlines earlier than the smaller companies, so if you are keen on the bigger companies look to start applying early. Over the course of your year you will be given real exposure to the business and really be able to get into the job, you may even be offered a graduate job afterwards.

Summer Internships…

…are usually 8 to 12 weeks over the summer (sometimes shorter) and are often run as part of a structured scheme by an employer. Because of the effort it takes to organise a student for short term employment it tends to be just the largest employers who organise a internship scheme. The internship schemes are often seen as the first step to a graduate job with sometimes 80 / 90% of interns coming back as graduates, and the application process is just as tough as the graduate assessments. Can provide you with a great CV booster, although you will have to sacrifice a summer of lie-ins, but you can do that at Uni!

Find out what our Guest Bloggers are getting up to. Throughtout the year we will be following the progress of our Guest Bloggers as they find a placement or keep us updated as to what they are doing on their placement. Click here to read all entries from our bloggers or click here to meet them.

NEARLY CHRISTMAS…

…But its still all doom and gloom thanks to the credit crunch. Steel is not exactly the most sought after product at the moment and the site I am now at has just held meeting discussing ways we can cut costs without having to make anyone redundant. This is my time to shine, I’m going to come up with some amazing ideas and earn the company millions!! Or probably not, but hopefully I will be able to use what we have learnt at uni to try and suggest some money saving ideas.

Well anyways on a brighter note, one of the other placement students is having her 21st on Saturday and we have to go dressed as something our name begins with so I’m thinking a Mexican at the moment, I’ll put some pics up in my next blog, but yeah should be a good laugh. The Christmas party is coming up too, well the Christmas party at a different site is happening soon anyways but I’m going to head down with some of the students from that site. There’s going to be free bumper cars apparently, how goods that!

Back to the placement side of things and my job is going pretty well, been doing a lot of stuff on my own the last couple of weeks and starting to get to grips with everything. Been quite quiet so far with the crunch and Christmas but should start to pick up in January. Learning a lot about how to shut a company down haha but no it is quite a good thing to do placement, I’m definitely learning new things as I go along and feel that I’ll benefit from it. Oh and living with 3rd year students isn’t to bad either, they aint going out as much as 1st and 2nd year obviously so they haven’t been to yobbish just yet, maybe when dissertations are handed in and exams are over I’ll miss out on a few nights sleep but so far so good!!

Find out what our Guest Bloggers are getting up to. Throughtout the year we will be following the progress of our Guest Bloggers as they find a placement or keep us updated as to what they are doing on their placement. Click here to read all entries from our bloggers or click here to meet them.

 Hello all, I start this blog by saying that I am ready to admit I am on the path to old age!! I have turned 21. I had a fun time on the nights we went out, lost a lot of money in the casino and drunk way too many beers. After the hangovers went and the bottles of champagne were cleared, I realised that ….. I was now old. This put me in a kind of depressing mood for the week after my well deserved holiday. Who will know how things will turn out now, will I become more mature? or will I become depressed? what will this new number of age bring??

Anyway back on to my placement, the quarterly briefing went quite well. We were told that the group had good financial stability and that we were looking at breaking even, which in my eyes and current economic situation I thought was a good achievement for the company. THEN!! one week later we had little informal meeting, I have to say these are the worse kind of meetings. We were told that the company was due to make a big loss at the end of the year and that hours will be cut and that jobs may be lost. I have never been in this situation before and been in the office later that day, it home to some people and they become very emotional and I did not know what to do. I felt quite helpless and speechless (not like me at all!!). After this all settled down things have started to get back to normal as my colleagues try forget about what they have been told.

I end this on that, I have arranged a customer visit before the end of the month were I will visit the customer by myself without the help of manager. Which may be fun, a guy who has known about stainless steel for 4 months going out and telling a customer what’s what. But I am really looking forward to it!!! So I am going to leave it there as this blog is quite depressing and I’m getting depressed writing it. So join me soon when everything will be happy again. HAPPY TIMES!!