How Do You Make A Success of Your Placement? The Student View!
So you’ve made it: despite the incredible odds, the tiresome application forms, the tricky interview questions and the hassle of tailoring your CV for each different job, you’ve finally secured a placement or internship. Surely now it’s just a case of cruising through your time in the company and waiting for them to offer you a full-time contract? Well, in a word: no. Even though a survey from the National Council For Work Experience showed that 73% of employers have offered permanent positions after placements, it’s still not a guarantee of success. We asked some students who had succeeded to give us their tips.
Make Sure You Get Your Foot In The Right Door
There’s only one thing that can ruin the wonderful moment when a recruiter tells you they’d like to offer you a full-time job and an all-expenses paid sponsorship for your third year. That’s when you have to say no because you don’t like them or the job. Researching the right placement or internship for you (see “How do you find the right placement or internship?”) means you’re more likely to have your foot in the right door.
“I took a long time to see where I wanted to work, attending careers fairs, reading the literature and looking at various accountancy firms,” says Chris Girdlestone who did an internship at chartered accountants Grant Thornton. “You have to approach applying for an internship in the same way that you would if you were applying for a job. Even if there’s no guarantee you’ll get a job it’s better to be inside a company you’d ultimately like to work for.”
Write A Plan For Your Placement
Your placement or internship shouldn’t just be about what your employer wants from you – it should also be about what you want to experience too. Put together a list of reasonable (e.g. you might want do a Sir Alan Sugar and fire someone and watch them cry but it’s unlikely they’ll let you) experiences you’d like to get during your placement or internship. It could be to sit in on a sales call, or to attend a marketing meeting, or learn more about HR. Share this with your employer and they’ll probably be glad to help you.
“In my placement I think I got more out of it because I knew some of the things that I wanted to be working on,” says Aadil Sadiq who did an internship at Merrill Lynch. “You do hear about some placement students who end up doing really mundane things but it makes you wonder if they told their employer what they were interested in, or suggested where they could use their skills. If you’ve got a plan it definitely helps.”
Learn How To Communicate And How To Listen
Placements and internships are an ideal time to work on your communication skills and that means learning to listen to what someone is telling you and talking to people. Even if you feel that things are going badly, discuss it with your manager and never feel like you can’t ask questions – you’re on your placement or internship to learn and that means you will have to ask questions, lots of them.
“When it comes to placements, communication should definitely go both ways,” says Riccardo Bacigalupo, a film studies student who did a placement project with charity Special Effect. “During the project we were liaising regularly about what they wanted and I asked lots of questions. I think because of that they treated me as someone who is capable of providing a service, not just filling a space which happens sometimes if you just sit there quietly.”
Under-Promise and Over-Achieve
This is a tricky balance to strike and to be clear it absolutely does not mean that you should make incredibly feeble promises and only go slightly beyond them! It means that you should be realistic about what you can do in any given situation and then work hard to go beyond that.
“Proactive is the one key word I was given when we had our training,” says Tom Mercer, an intern from KPMG. “Do the work you’re given and do it to the best of your ability, ask questions to make sure you’re getting it right and then go and find more work as well. Day one on my placement I was told to do something on Excel. I had no idea what to do so I went and asked people and got on with it. They expected it would take me all week and I did it in a day.”
Meet People, Remember Their Names And Develop Your Network
Ultimately, when it comes to a recruiter deciding whether they want to employ you, it will be influenced by the people you’ve been working with during your placement or internship. This doesn’t mean you have to suck up, but you should be polite and approachable and get to know as many people as possible while you’re on the inside.
“It’s very important to get involved with the other team members within a company,” says Girdlestone on his time at Grant Thornton. “We had a lot of social activities put on and I made sure I got to as many of those as I could because it’s a great way to network. They want to get to know you too and work out whether you’re good for the team. They’ll see the quality of your work in the office but they also want to get an idea of what sort of person you are too and how you’ll integrate with the organisation.”
VIDEO: Ernst & Young Summer Internship Programme
Hena Yearley tells HereComesTheBoss how she made a success of her internship at Ernst & Young…
Five Ways To Ruin Your Placement On The First Day
Look Like A Mess — The golden rule is that it’s far better to dress smartly and have to take off your tie if you’re over-dressed than it is to try and hide the offensive slogan on your t-shirt.
Be Hungover — Aside from leaving you dull and prone to asking “where’s the toilet?” being hung-over tells a potential recruiter exactly what they need to know – i.e. that you don’t care about the job.
Not Be Prepared - Remembering little things like working pens, a notepad, some tissues and the name of the person you’re meeting stops you looking like someone who’s bluffing their way into the professional world.
Don’t Turn Up On Time — Practice your route. Double-check timetables, get there half an hour early and go for a coffee to calm down. Don’t turn up red-faced and sweaty having just run for two miles.
Be Disinterested — Try and remember people’s names. Smile. Be happy. You’ve got the opportunity – now you can work to make it permanent.
