Professional Placement Year - Christ Church Business School

Our year in industry scheme is available to all undergraduate students studying within the Business School on single or combined honours courses.

A year in industry offers you the opportunity to explore a role in an organisation over a 6 – 12 month period. You will complete your year in industry in your third year, after your first two years of study and then return to complete your fourth and final year

The aims of a placement are:

to prepare you for your final stage studies through a placement in a relevant business function and help you make an informed career choice when you graduate;
to give you an appreciation of the business environment through hands-on experience;
to give you opportunities to take what you've learned in the classroom out into the wider world.

Over a third of recruiters who took part in the research repeated their warnings from previous years – that graduates who have had no previous work experience at all are unlikely to be successful during the selection process and have little or no chance of receiving a job offer for their organisations’ graduate programmes.
High Fliers, 2017

Help and support

While it is your responsibility to find a placement, there is dedicated support on offer to you from the School to help you find a placement and prepare for your year in industry. We will help you to identify suitable opportunities, make applications and prepare for interviews, secure a role, and monitor and support you during your placement.

Available for all Christ Church Business School students

A year in industry is available to all undergraduate students studying a Christ Church Business School cousre, including single and combined honours.
Previous students have worked at companies such as Cummins, Enterprise rent a Car, Church & Dwight , Instron, Barbour, Russell Publishing, Vauxhall, P&O Ferries, CCCU, Nike, Medway Community Health Care to name a few. You can read about our students' experiences by reading our student work placement profiles.

FAQs

Any student studying a Business School programme (combined or single honours) can complete a year in industry.

The tuition cost of the programme is £1,850*. This can be covered by Student Finance England and you are still entitled to a reduced maintenance loan.

You are responsible for securing your own placement, but there is extensive support on offer to you but there is extensive support on offer to you. We have a dedicated placement team within the Business School and the University's Employability Team to support and help you secure your placement.

We encourage all placements to be paid. Salaries range from £13,000 – £21,000 per annum. If a student decides to complete an unpaid placement this is their decision, but it is not recommended.

You will be recognised for this on your degree transcript which will read ‘COURSE TITLE with a professional placement’.

There is extensive support on offer to you from the placement team and University employability team. This takes the form of workshops, one-to-one appointments and other initiatives. The team can help you develop your CV, application forms and online profile as well sit down with you to talk over placement options.

You are required to complete a placement portfolio, a reflective piece of writing on your experience. This is graded as pass or fail.

Yes all students studying single or combined honours can do a placement as long as they have successfully completed their second year of study.

You can complete your placement anywhere you like providing it meets the placement quality criteria. Students have completed placements across the UK, Europe and the rest of the world.

Not at all, the point of completing a placement is to give you career focus. Therefore we encourage you to explore your career interests, which may not always be what you are studying.

The Business School has links with a number of companies across the UK and abroad but we encourage students to look for opportunities across a wide variety of organisations and industry sectors to find opportunities that appeal to them and fit with their long term interests.

A good starting point is Finding Placements, Internships and Jobs.

Once you have been offered your placement, there is a small amount of paper work to do and so you need to contact the Placements Administrator (placements.fsess@canterbury.ac.uk) or the academic lead for placements, Julian Glover (julian.glover@canterbury.ac.uk).

You must have secured your placement and had it approved at the latest by September of the placement year.

You need to complete a Change of Study form, found on the Student Portal, to enable you to return to University to complete your third and final year.