The recent High Fliers Survey published on the 18th January revealed how important it is for students to gain work experience before they graduate.

Martin Birchall, Managing Director of High Fliers Research explains:

“It’s not enough just to have a good degree.  Students need to have business skills.  Employers want them to be able to hit the ground running.”

Almost all of the UK’s leading graduate employers are offering work experience programmes for students and recent graduates during the 2010-2011 academic year.   It stresses the importance of students gaining those all important employability skills before they graduate in order to secure a graduate job.

This is where we come in…..RateMyPlacement can help you find a placement or internship – we don’t want you to be another statistic and an unemployed graduate!

There are several deadlines coming up including Hiscox, Mayer Brown, Microsoft, IBM and Centrica to name but a few!  Check out the ratemyplacement.co.uk and apply now to avoid disappointment

Good luck!

The RateMyPlacement Team

The winners of the 2011 National Placement & Internship Awards have been announced!

In front of a packed auditorium at Cass Business School on Thursday 20th January, the outstanding achievements of employers, universities and students were celebrated, with over 200 attendees from the world of graduate recruitment, higher education as well as talented students from the top universities.

The morning saw the official launch of our new  On-Campus Promotions venture, with Ali and Alana running an interactive and engaging session around the results from our first Undergraduate Engagement Survey. The ‘ask the audience’ style electronic pads in the audience sparked some interesting results to say the least! More information on this, plus the results of our survey, will be available later this week.

After the break our Key Note Speaker, Zain Latif, explained how his internship experiences helped him become the youngest VP at a major investment bank, and Oliver Sidwell, Co-Founder of  RateMyPlacement.co.uk ran the Awards Ceremony itself.

With 14 Awards in total across all stakeholders, the Awards were presented to those who have demonstrated their outstanding achievements in the world of placements and internships…

Click on the button below to find out who took home the Awards…

Time is running out for you to prove yourself to be the Undergraduate of the Year and win international placements with leading companies! Deadline is 31st Jan!

There are 12 Awards up for grabs to identify the top undergraduates in Law, Finance, Business, Engineering, Construction Engineering/ Design, IT/Computer Science, Economics, Accountancy, Mathematics, Management, Structures & Systems, Art & Humanities, plus a special ‘First Year’ Award open to undergraduates from any course who have just started their second year.

The rewards are great: winners’ prizes include cash, internships and all-expenses paid trips to New York, South Africa and continental Europe and the final 10 students in each Award will be invited to the Undergraduate of the Year Awards in Canary Wharf London on 16th April, 2011 where the winners will be announced to national press coverage by The Rt Hon Michael Portillo.

If you make the final 10, not only will you be very close to a fantastic prize, you will have proved yourself to be amongst the best and most employable students in the country.

Enter at http://undergraduateoftheyear.com

Closing date for entries: 31 January 2011

It’s an exciting time as many of you people on placement reach the half way stage. Ben, one of our Guest Bloggers updates us with his experiences so far…

“Working at State Street has been demanding form the beginning. I am now 6 months through the year long placement and it has zoomed by. This is both a positive and a negative: good from the perspective that I feel this is a point where I can reassess. Working a 45 hour week can become routine too easily and it is important to remember what you want to get out of your work placement. My sound advice to placement students is to attempt to set some goals as you enter a new phase, for me, this has been the entry to the New Year and reaching the culmination of my first project. On the other hand, it is a shame that I am half way through. I feel I have much more to achieve before the end of this year and so I’m ready to set a few goals.

I have spent much of my time at the bank focussing on a project which as I mentioned is coming towards its final phase now. I have been encouraged by the possibility of my research being published which is a fantastic inspiration. This is my first goals which I intend to achieve in the next month. The point to keep in mind is why you are doing what you are, and what you want by the end. Remember it is just as much about the company, so when I say get what you want, I encourage maintenance of putting the company before yourself.

Before Christmas, it was time to help with the interviews for the next round of interns. There are 3 interns from the University of Surrey working in the banks Research department, and we were asked to help assess and select viable candidates who we would help interview with senior members of the team. This was fascinating. Reading applicant’s CVs and being on the other side of the interview table, asking rather than answering the questions, was a valuable eye-opener. Having been in this position exactly a year ago, I relished this opportunity. It made me reassess my interview style and I took away tips and tricks which I will employ in the future. My advice is to get involved if you can with any interview processes. This is priceless in my opinion and I really enjoyed it.

I am looking forward to what I can make out of the second half of the year.”

You can also find out more from Ben at State Street, as well as our other Guest Bloggers over the coming year!

Feel free to add your thoughts below! Would you like a placement at State Street?

Firstly, happy New Year to you all!

I hope everyone had a good Christmas, New Year and managed to get plenty of placement and internship applications in!

We spotted a very interesting article in The Guardian last Sunday regarding new plans to accredit students who gain employability skills and work experience during their studies. Sounds like a good plan to me…

If there is one positive that comes out of the decision to increase tuition fees, it is that prospective students will have to think long and hard about which university to attend and what course to do, to ensure that their decision maximises their potential employability upon graduation. So any move that results in universities looking at the courses they offer and the need to embed employability and work experience within them is a good one in our eyes.

The Confederation of British Industry said it would be “broadly in favour of universities including more workplace and employability skills in undergraduate courses”. Everyone knows that in the current economic climate, graduating after three years without any work experience or employability skills means you’re likely to end up in the a queue at the job centre so for us, the need for an increasing number of universities to integrate placements, internships and corporate involvement within their degrees is vital.

Check out the article in full via this link.