Supporting applicationsThe support given to students in applying for a placement varies widely. At one end, there is nothing. “We expect students to find their own placements. Certainly find their own employment afterwards, but also their own placements.” In other institutions, placement provision is coordinated centrally. “So the usual mechanism is we have a central placements office, the central-placement team in the university. So they come and give a talk at the start of the second year, week zero, to the students to say, placements coming up. And they arrange a whole lot of workshops.” As well as the student-facing aspect of this support, when placements are organised centrally so are the relationships with employers.
When placement support is located in the department it is often constituted as part of an academic’s job. “In my own department it’s somebody’s duty within the department to do that. So, it’s a few hours a week.” In some departments this can be quite a loose arrangement. “I look after all the placements and employability for the placements and undergraduates. So quite a lot. Those last two roles are more, in a way, voluntary.” In some departments, support is literally invisible. “We had one administrator who was particularly pro-active, who then left. And nobody realised how pro-active they’d been and it all, kind of, collapsed a bit. We send the emails around, generally, of, ‘Here’s a job.’ And remind them that there’s a website where they can look for jobs and things. But I think this administrator was targeting individuals saying, ‘Here’s a placement that would really suit you.’ And, you know, ‘Come and show me your CV and let’s get your application into this employer or something.’ So, chasing the students up and being quite pro-active on that front. So although the students had to get their own job, there was quite a lot of extra support going on.” At the other extreme, a few departments employ dedicated personnel. “In 2009, after I’d been doing this work for a couple of years, the department actually realised that it was a full-time job. They changed my job and made this my full role, to act as an interface between the companies and the students and the academics.” Sometimes departments employ more than one person to the role. “All we do (there are two of us) is help those students find placements. We work on a one-to-one basis with them as many times as they want.” In between there are a variety of arrangements. “[We] bring in some external staff who assist the students in actually securing placements; it’s somebody in the faculty who does that across several departments.”
Brokering and distributing informationSeveral institutions have mechanisms for organising and distributing information to students. “There are companies that come to us and say, ‘Please can we have some more of your students applying for our jobs? Because they were good last year and we want some more good ones this year.’ So, what we do is collect up all these sorts of jobs, stick them on a forum, and the secretary who does all this then emails the students every week to say, ‘These jobs are coming up; the closing dates are coming up.’ Every week. ‘The closing dates are coming up; these are the ones you should apply for this weekend.’ The clever thing we’ve done this year is switch from sending that email on Monday to sending it on Friday.” The presentation and timing of emails is important. “One thing we found is the whole university careers and employability service has a recruitment site that employers can go on to and register jobs, so it does attract a lot of local companies. But what the employability people were finding is that students were getting just general emails all the time, and they were ignoring it. Whereas when the girl involved phoned me up and said, ‘I’ve got this really good job, and no-one’s applying’. I would then send the students out an email and, you know what, they all apply for it.”
Monitoring applications Departments need to be sensitive to the student lifecycle, to make sure that applications are made in a timely fashion.“Once students get busier, on their course, and deadlines appear and things like that, it’s easier to put finding a placement to one side.” Knowing these problematic spots, some departments make targeted interventions. “For some students all they require is, probably, a little bit of motivation. It’s just unless somebody’s actually putting it in front of them they’re not going to think about it. So even an occasional [reminder] encouraging them to think about it could have a big impact for some students.” In several departments these
interventions are not one-shot, not only geared to stimulate the first attempt. “But what you find is that around January time, December to January, people may have done their first couple of placement applications, may have been unsuccessful, and rather than continuing to engage in that, learn from it and improve, they drop out, and go back into concentrating on their academic study. So that’s where we try to re-engage them. We’re successful with some, and we’re less successful with others. But what we try to do is core reminders about opportunities; statistics and data around, ‘By this time, only this many people have found placements.’ So it’s kind of making them feel as though it’s a normal part of the process.”
AutomationSome departments are working to automate the monitoring of applications. “I was looking at that process and trying to quantify it, and trying to look at what appropriate automated triggers would be. So for example, if you applied and you were unsuccessful, setting a trigger point of two weeks that would automatically mail them with tips on how to improve their CV. So it doesn’t necessarily need the big resource of more people to check things with them, or to interview them, but can be trying to use some simple persuasive technology, persuasive design techniques, to keep them engaged.” Several institutions have online systems (either externally provided, or home-grown) that manage and monitor the entire placement process. “So effectively, for any job, whether it’s a full-year placement or shorter term work experience, it all goes through the same system. Employers register with it, and they can post the type of job that they’re interested in, all the usual details associated with that. And then the students can apply as appropriate. Well, it’s monitoring what’s going on, so you can actually see the number of applications, you can see who has applied.” Sometimes information from automatic monitoring can be disappointing. “We have on our Intranet a part of our sort of virtual learning Intranet we have a dedicated section that is for careers and job opportunities. We regularly send stuff, often by recruitment agencies, sometimes by companies, career opportunities. All sorts of stuff goes onto that Intranet service. We know because we monitor it, it gets almost no footfall from the students. Virtually none.”
Some departments integrate online systems with face-to-face interventions to ensure students are engaging with placement application. “So, we have these external recruiters who provide lists of placements and so on that get sent out to students. But in order for students to receive that they have to have met with their personal tutor and got their CV up and running and got the covering letter and stuff. And they have to meet with their personal tutor towards the end of the first semester before Christmas. So, it’s almost like a signing on session at the job centre where they have to say, you know, ‘These are the placements I’m applying for. This is my CV. This is my covering letter. This is what I’ve been doing.’ And if they aren’t engaging with that then it’s then that we start to say, ‘Okay, you need to be doing more if you do really want a placement.’ And then following that, once they’ve had that, they get the one-on-one advice from the consultants to help them further, if they still haven’t found a placement after we get back after Christmas.”
Failure and resilienceIt is universally acknowledged that not every student is successful at getting a placement, and Departments have ways of supporting them in that. “The students who don’t get placed, it’s usually either because they haven’t engaged with the placement office. Maybe they’re not engaging with many people at all. And that’s a problem we do have. Or they haven’t survived the first rejection. And we work very hard [at getting] them through it.” Some departments help students to look on the first failure as useful experience. “If they’re applying for placements in their second year and they’re not successful – it does happen – by the time they get to the third year, they’ve actually been through that process. They stand a much higher chance in their final year, rather than just coming into applying for jobs, new, in their final year.” Other departments help students to look at opportunities they may not have otherwise considered. “Picking them up after they’ve had that first failed interview where they’ve had a rejection from Facebook or Microsoft, or whoever it might be who’s their aspirational job. And actually saying, ‘But you can get these same skills from an SME’, or ‘You can get these same skills somewhere else, doing something else, and then work towards that as a graduate role.’” At best, failure provides motivation and direction for future applications “I had
one this morning. A student came in who had done a really, really prestigious internship with a really prestigious company and then said, ‘No. Having done that, I’m not sure this is what I want to do. What should I think about in terms of getting [a different] internship next year?’”
The enormity and realityEvery Department recognises the physical and mental burden that application places on students. “The employers these days put the students through horrendous hurdles. You know, we had one student who did twelve interviews, two assessment centres, goodness how many psychometric [maths] tests to get a placement. And they just can’t cope with that alongside their normal sort of student work.” Application procedures are often prolonged and make considerable demands. “We’re just very aware that the students do very well in industry, but they find the recruitment episode quite difficult sometimes. It’s a bit of a ritual that they have to go through and we want to tell them as much about it and give them as much experience and equip them for it. Some of these, if you look at the graduate application routes for Hewlett Packard and Morgan Stanley, it’s quite hard, just even these online forms, technical tests, assessment centres, three interviews … I wouldn’t like to go through it, put it that way. It’s quite daunting what some employers do.” Many would like to see a reform in application processes. “I think it would be helpful is if employers found a way of selecting the graduates they wanted in a somewhat less labour- intensive way. You know, it’s just been an arms race. Almost appears to be making it more and more difficult to succeed.”