International Work Placements

Work Placements Abroad

A placement abroad will provide students with an opportunity to experience a different culture and possibly a different language, as well as getting an insight into a foreign work environment.  We encourage students to work abroad, but this will operate within a different legislative framework from the UK, so students will need to be aware and expect differences. We recommend that students start preparing for a placement abroad early in their second year so that visas and other legal documentation, as well as cultural and language preparation courses, are in place by the time you start your placement. Graduate employers value the additional cultural awareness and linguistic skills that working abroad enables you to develop.

More than 150 students every year choose to spend their Professional Training Year abroad in a variety of ways. What you do, and how you structure this year partly depends on your degree subject and requirements, but also on what you want to do during this year.

For some degree programmes, such as languages, it is a requirement to spend the year abroad and most of these students chose to undertake an Erasmus work placement, working in organisations as varied as: Ernst & Young GmbH in Germany; Electricité de France in Paris; Volkswagen Navarra in Spain. Politics students have chosen to work for the Agence de Communication d’Influence et Lobbying in Paris and Psychologist to work in one of the Psychology laboratories at the Humboldt University in Berlin; Business and Management students are working in the Hilton Hotel in Toledo, Spain all with Erasmus funding.

Other students are working further afield: MPhys students are at TRIUMF in Vancouver, Canada; at ORNL, Tennessee in the USA, whereas Maths students work at Deloittes in Bermuda and Chemical Engineers at UOP LLC in Chicago; Chemistry students have worked at the RH Hills laboratory in New Zealand.

Business School and Tourism students have worked as far afield as Hong Kong, Dubai, Thailand and Florida, whereas Law students have gone to the AL-Modarra Law Office in Saudi Arabia, the Permanent Mission of Greece to the UN in New York, the Irish International Immigration Centre in Boston or the Public Defender’s Service in Washington DC, a law firm in Australia and another one in Mauritius.

Students from the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences are taking the opportunity of working at laboratories in another part of Europe – be it in Pamplona, Spain; Turku, Finland or Leuven in Belgium. Others are in the United States in North Carolina, Massachusetts, Oklahoma City, Washington State, New York or in Sydney, Australia. Students taking their degrees in Biochemistry, Nutrition, Microbiology or Micro and Cellular Science have all taken advantage of these opportunities.

You have to start early in your second year to think about what you might wish to do – talk to your Placement Coordinators; write your CV, apply, be interviewed and if you are thinking of working in another part of Europe taking a language course as part of the Global Graduate Award (GGA) for the first two years of your degree gives you a distinct advantage in securing a placement in Europe. However, if you have missed out on this there are Intensive Language courses prior to the start of your placement, in particular in the less-widely spoken languages. Again Erasmus can help fund these.

For Further Information about Erasmus Work Placements, go to http://www.britishcouncil.org/erasmus_work_placement_guide.pdf