
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 you 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.
Placements destinations
More than 300 students every year choose to spend their Professional Training placement 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.
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
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.
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.
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.
Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences
Other students are working further afield:
- MPhys students are at TRIUMF in Vancouver, Canada; at ORNL, Tennessee in the USA
- 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.
Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences
Students 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 Veterinary Biosciences have all taken advantage of these opportunities.
Psychology students have chosen to work in one of the psychology laboratories at the Humboldt University in Berlin or Turin.
Please visit our student experiences page to view videos of students talking about their experiences on work placements.
European work placements
Please note: Erasmus+ funding is secured until 2023. Students abroad in 2020/21 and 2021/22 will be unaffected by the UK's decision not to participate in Erasmus+ in the future.
For further information about Erasmus work placements, please see the British Council's Erasmus work placement guide.
Key documents


Find out more
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.