Rate My Placement

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.

Bookmark It

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!!

Bookmark It

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!!

Bookmark It

Things are moving fast, and I now have my first invitation to an assessment centre! It’s quite a way to travel, and I’m not looking forward to the 2:00AM start, but it’s for a role I want so I think it’ll be worth it. I’ve been told that there are two face-to-face interviews involved, which I have to admit I’m not looking forward to (plenty of espresso at the station methinks). Other than that, I’m looking forward to it.

One other company got back to me one morning last week at 9:00AM, for an on-the-spot phone interview (what is it with these companies and early starts?) which actually went down surprisingly well! Despite not having a detailed knowledge of the company in question, my interviewer seemed happy with my answers: she even gave me the date of the assessment centre and told me I had a good chance of getting through. Fingers crossed this isn’t something she says to everyone

I’ve done one more application since my last post, which was a pretty standard affair to be honest. I’m used to the process by now, and have a bank of prepared answers making things speedier. I’d definitely recommend keeping a copy of any applications you make, both because it’s useful for making further applications, and because it always helps to know exactly what you’ve told a company when (if) they call you back

Bookmark It

Having been at Logica for 4 months now I can safely say it has been a good and worth while experience so far. When I joined the company I didn’t have any idea on what the job would be like. As Logica is project based I did not have a set role and was under a very general role. I found that being under a general role helped me do what I wanted to do and shape my own experience at Logica rather than Logica shaping my experience for me.

In the first week of my placement I was asked to help our marketing department with various tasks. I found myself doing various administration tasks as well as design. This was a nice experience to bring me into the company. I then went onto working for the resourcing department and did IT related tasks for our internal system as well as the client (Shell). This project was a springboard for my next project that I pro-actively found.

Currently I am working on a technical project on a financial transaction system. When I was accepted for the role it seemed like a daunting task, however getting exposure to ‘industry standard’ work has helped me in understanding the core components within my degree and modules at university finally seem to make sense! So to summarise I wasn’t originally being challenged as much as I wanted to but I am currently on a Java based project that is helping me learn lots of new skills that I can take back to university with me.

Bookmark It

Well, I’ve been at my new site for 2 weeks now and yeah it’s going alright, I’m enjoying it a lot more mainly due to the fact I have a specified role and am learning new skills. I’m working with CAD systems now, putting CAD drawings onto templates of steels sheets ready for laser, plasma and water jet cutting machines to cut different shapes of steel out for the customers. Apparently the number of mistakes down to the CAD system has been substantially high over the last few years and so I’ve been brought in to help reduce the number of mistakes so it should be quite a good experience. Also the staff at my new site are a lot younger and so I feel that I fit in better here, and lots of staff nights out might be on the cards which should be good. Work would be much better if I didn’t have to start at 8.30 every morning but hey at least I’ve not been made redundant from this job just yet.

Bookmark It

I feel I have settled into work much more recently, I’m now getting into more of a routine and feel I know more about the business. Over the past couple of weeks we’ve been preparing for the launches of the about 18 of the new Deli Bar products, so ensuring everything is correct on the computer systems and getting all of the storyboards and product info sheets in place.

This has been a hectic time, although I have enjoyed this. I have now taken on the role of setting out the taste panel both in the morning and the afternoon as the factory is getting busier due to the Christmas period approaching. This has taken up a lot of my time as all of the paperwork and preparation takes around 2 hours per panel. I am trying to manage this with the other work which I have to do, which is also increasing. I am also continuing with the KPI work and Bakkavor report which I am understanding more of now. We recently had a visit from M&S who have now approved the format of the report, making writing it much easier. Everyone is getting more stressed now that Christmas is approaching, which is making the atmosphere a little tense, although I am trying not to get involved!

Bookmark It

Well, what a lively couple of weeks! It’s been tricky finding the time to do applications along with uni work (my social life is pretty much in tatters at the moment) but I’ve managed to slot a couple more in. This may or may not have included a 23:53 submission on Thursday night for a certain well-known motor company (who’s deadline was so near I could practically hear the ticking). Unlike any of the other companies I’ve applied to so far, this one provides detailed job descriptions for each of the roles available. This was a great help to me, and now that I have a job title in my head I’m much more determined to see the application through; one way or another.

Company A (see my last post) turned out to be a bit of a dead end, but not in a bad way. I had a chat with the Chief Operating Officer over the phone, and in the end it was the credit crunch that let me down (isn’t it always?). Although they would have considered taking me on full-time, they were apprehensive about investing a lot of time and money in a placement student who might disappear after 40 weeks, never to be heard of again. From the sounds of it they didn’t have much work for me to do anyway, and keeping busy was definitely one of the criteria I had in my head when I started down this path. We mutually agreed that it was best that I kept on looking, but the experience has definitely not put me off other SMEs.

The issues with Company B have been sorted, and the aptitude tests were just as tricky as I had imagined. For someone with A-Level maths none of the questions were difficult, but the less-than-generous time limits created quite a bit of pressure. Just as the introduction had warned me, I didn’t manage to complete all of the sections. Despite this I’m confident that I’ve done well enough, now it’s just fingers crossed that I’ll get through to my first assessment centre.

Bookmark It

Now things are starting to get rolling!! My second blog, were should I start? With my awesome nights out or my ever intensifying placement.

OK then nights out, you still got to be a student even though you are still on placement!! Well it was Halloween in the days that have passed, so me and my friends organised a mid-week exploration of the wonderful town that is LEEDS. As you can see from the photo which may have been uploaded now I
didn’t have to get dressed up much as that was a day after work, my colleagues do say I look like a zombie early in the morning’s!! Anyway awesome night.

Back to my placement, things going well currently. WELL today I was stuck in traffic for 2 hours coming into work, so not the happiest of moods. As I left you on the last blog I was off to a couple of places, well Sweden unluckily got cancelled last minute. But Wales we got there! Even if it was through a blizzard and with this customer visit I saw more in depth what happens to the shiny metal of which I sell!! This time I saw it been produced into them things that milk cows (Don’t know what they called for
all the people that want to know) Interesting!! Then we talked figures and was quite intense but was a great experience one that should help me in my final year, to show that I have real experience in buying and selling situations. One disappointment was the lunch POOR!! The order which I told you about is still going through it’s motions but no doubt the wheels will falter at some stage.

You are now fully briefed, now you have to look forward to this! Well we not doing as much business as I first started, maybe due credit crunch who knows!! This month I have the quarterly briefing to look forward to ( Maybe lunch will be better?) and also I have a couple of customer visits lined up as it is end of the year and prices need discussing!! But main thing is that it is my birthday soon 21st as well so that will needed to be celebrated in style.

Join me again as I make my work up the hierarchy, and soon stainless steel domination!!

Bookmark It

Well, so far it’s going well. Without mentioning any names, I’ve applied to three companies this last fortnight, and received acknowledgments from two.

The first (company A) is a smaller outfit, which I stumbled upon while Googling. They seem to have a great attitude towards work, and although they haven’t had a placement student before, they look like a great option for me. I received a response from them the very next day, which really impressed me, and had my CV elevated to the CEO within the week! I’m currently negotiating a phone interview, so I’ll keep you posted on how that goes!

Company B is a much larger player, and as such the application process was a lot more formalised. After re-writing my CV to match their template, I submitted my application via their online recruitment system. The response came a few days later, notifying me that I had gotten through to the second round: the online attitude tests. I was impressed by their speed, but this good first impression was soon shattered by an error message which (1) prevented me from starting the tests, and (2) locked me out of the system. Urrgrgh. Tech support has been e-mailed, but in the mean time I am left hanging.

This is the exact reason why I am apprehensive about taking my placement at a larger company. Yes, they have established systems for students, but how beneficial is this to me? It’s all very well saying how much you value students in your literature and on your website, but when it comes down to it this has to be supported by the experience. Left with this bitter taste in my mouth, do I really want to go through a whole year with this type of organisation? We’ll just have to see what their next step is…

Bookmark It