Student placements and internships - why bother? 15/02/2010

Category:

Rate Article

Currently 4/5 Stars.
1
2
3
4
5

(2 Votes)

To put it plainly, as a first or second year student, looking for a placement or an internship is a pain in the arse. Hundreds of applications with little or no response makes the process seem laborious, unfulfilling and worthless, and that’s just the student’s perspective. As an employer, having your inbox clogged up with hundreds of below par CVs isn’t a thrilling prospect. So is an internship scheme bottom of your agenda? Or is it one of the most valuable parts of your recruitment strategy?

Click to jump to section

Placements & internships- what's the difference?
Why should employers have internship schemes?
Downsides of internship schemes for employers
Case study: 3M’s internship scheme
National placement & internship awards - winner
Are all students positive about internships?
Internship schemes - vital for employers

Oliver Sidwell, co-founder, RateMyPlacement.co.uk

Oliver Sidwell, 25, graduated from Loughborough University in 2007 and is the co-founder of RateMyPlacement.co.uk, the UK’s premier undergraduate recruitment website.

Placements & internships- what's the difference?

To be honest, there’s no real difference! A placement is usually referred to as a year-long form of work experience often undertaken as part of a student’s degree course, and an internship is usually referred to as a shorter term form of work experience, typically between two to twelve weeks over the summer.

Why should employers have internship schemes?

Since setting up RateMyPlacement.co.uk, an undergraduate recruitment website specialising in student placements and internships, I have spoken with hundreds of graduate recruiters. The best answer I can possibly give, I learnt at a meeting with 3M in Bracknell.

3M were one of our first clients in 2007 so we knew they took on a decent cohort of students each year. However, it wasn’t until we found out that 16 out of the 29 Directors on the 3M board had previously undertaken a student placement at 3M, did I actually realise the importance of the 3M placement scheme to the firm’s overall recruitment and business strategy.

Downsides of internship schemes for employers

For some companies, interships don’t work and for a whole variety of reasons. Firstly, if you only take on a handful of ‘young people’ each year, it would make sense to choose a more mature and experienced graduate over a first or second year with less experience.

Also, if the summer is a quiet time for your business, it would seem unwise to bring additional staff in over that period. However, if 16 out of the 29 board of directors at 3M did a placement there, the placement scheme must be doing something right...

Case study: 3M’s internship scheme

3M’s strategy is to hand pick the best talent early.

Identifying the right talent at an earlier stage allows 3M to feed their graduate pipeline with the successful ones, placing graduates that understand 3M and proactively want to come back and work for 3M. This ensures the time, effort and resource involved in graduate recruitment is reduced and the possibility of their graduates leaving in the first 12 months near negligible.

So 3M’s scheme is engrained in their business strategy and is a part of the culture of the organisation, but which company runs the best scheme?

National placement & internship awards - winner

We recently launched the National Placement & Internship Awards, designed to celebrate excellence in student placements and internships specifically to answer this question! Our headline award, sponsored by Changeboard, was based entirely on the opinions of students in the student written reviews on RateMyPlacement, and the winner was Microsoft, beating over 800 employers and being rated by students as the Best Placement & Internship Employer 2010.

Quotes from the Microsoft reviews:
"I looked forward to coming into work every morning of my placement. I felt like I was part of the team from day 1 and was respected as an employee, not a student"

"You cannot get a better placement. The amount of experience and opportunities provided are not matched in any other placement I have heard of"

Are all students positive about internships?

No! Here’s a couple of quotes from less positive student reviews:

"I did not feel valued in the slightest I don’t think people wanted me there"

"It was a disaster. I was made up a job but the job structure was not thought out well and ended up ruining my placement."

88% of the 3,000 student reviews on RateMyPlacement are rated 6.0?10 or above, and 70% of reviews rated 7.0/10 or above, clearly showing the vast majority of students have an above average experience. A handful of students have a poor experience, but like my placement, I learnt what I didn’t want to do which turned out to be an invaluable lesson.

Internship schemes - vital for employers

With graduate vacancies last year plummeting by 24.9% (AGR summer survey 2009), competition for graduate roles is ever increasing; a placement or internship provides students with an experience that differentiates them amongst their peers and an opportunity that is becoming more popular by the day.

With students clearly benefitting from placements and internships, and blue chip employers such as Microsoft and 3M both evidently citing their schemes as the place to find the future leaders of their respective organisations, can you afford not to run a placement or internship scheme?