What are the benefits of completing a Placement?
A Placements Year offers a range of benefits including:
- Offering you an insight into the ‘World of Work’ and allows you to get a feel for what you do and don’t like doing
- Adds invaluable work experience to your CV which is attractive to graduate employers
- Provides the opportunity to work with a more diverse group of people
- Able to apply elements of academic learning in the workplace
- Develops your skills further in many areas including; time management, email/business communication, project work, working in a team
- Gives you experience of applying for jobs and interview practice – and the potential to secure a job before returning to your final studies
A Placement Year offers you a chance to ‘road-test’ both a job and company before any permanent commitment is made, it gives you the opportunity to become familiar with a certain kind of company and decide for yourself if this suits your own career goals. It is also worth noting that many employers use placement opportunities as a way to recruit into their graduate jobs with 42% of placement students returning to their placement provider after their final year of study. (Institute of Student Employers 2017).
The benefit of returning to your final year of study knowing you have secured a graduate level role can be very comforting. Just knowing you have professional work experience to demonstrate to graduate employers alongside your academic record keeps you ahead of the competition. In a competitive graduate market employers are looking for both high academic ability and relevant work experience.
High Flyers Research report on the Graduate Market in 2018 found “More than a third of recruiters who took part in the research repeated their warnings from previous years – that graduates who have had no previous work experience at all are unlikely to be successful during the selection processes for the top employers’ graduate programmes”.
