Work 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 300 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 or Turin; Business and Management students are working at Amazon, Huawei, and Airbus in France; Goldman Sachs, Otto and H-Flachs in Germany, KIgn's Group, Macmillan and Tata Steel in 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, Canada, New Zealand and the Philippines, whereas Law students have recently gone to work at MCI in Brussels, Adi Levit in Israel and VeryChic in Barcelona.
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 South Carolina, Texas, Washington State, New York or in Sydney, Australia. Students taking their degrees in Biological Sciences, Biochemistry, Nutrition, Microbiology or Vetinerary Biosciences 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 online linguistic support facilities funded by the European Commission for: French, Spanish, German, Italian, Greek, Czech, Polish, Danish, Portuguese, Swedish, Finnish, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Slovak, Slovenian and Dutch. If you are applying to work in an organisation in Europe and are required to work in one of the languages mentioned above, you will automatically be assessed on your language ability. This is mandatory for students who will be receiving the Erasmus+ grant. You will be given access to this online facilty as soon as possible once you have secured your placement.
Please note: the status of the Erasmus+ scheme is dependent on the outcome of the Brexit negotiations.
For Further Information about Erasmus Work Placements, please see the British Council's Erasmus work placement guide.
Please visit our Student experiences page to view videos of students talking about their experiences on work placements.
The Employability and Careers Centre provides useful information for those thinking of working abroad. To find out about the job markets, typical employers and vacancy sources as well as work experience and further study possibilities in more than 50 countries all over the world, please visit the Employability and Careers Centre's, working abroad pages.
