How a placement student can bring value to your business

At Huddersfield Business School, we prioritise not only the development of our students, but also how we can positively impact our local and regional businesses through our student talent. Our award-winning Employability and Placement team have an excellent track record of placing hundreds of students on a wide range of industry placements from multinational corporations to local small to medium enterprises (SMEs), ensuring that when our students graduate, they have the skills and knowledge to be put at the forefront of the graduate employment race.

If you’re a business that is looking for fresh ideas and you want to help your business grow, a placement student can be a great asset. They can help with out of the box thinking and can bring new, imaginative ideas gained through their university experience.

In this blog, you’ll hear from Elena Dooley, the Marketing Operations Manager at Cummins who has worked at the organisation for over 12 years. Elena shares with us the value her current marketing placement student, Nahiyan has brought to Cummins over the past 6 months through the improvements she has made to the company’s overall operations. 

 

Can you tell us about your organisation and your role within it?

My name is Elena Dooley, and I am the Marketing Operations Manager at Cummins, a global power technology leader of reliable, clean power solutions including diesel, natural gas, hybrid, electric and other alternative solutions. Cummins has been in the business for over a century and has over 70,000 employees worldwide. 

My role is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States and consists of leading and supporting our global marketing and communications organisation with tools and processes that enable our organisational success. 

Cummins is a key employer in Huddersfield, offering many placement vacancies yearly. What do you think are the key benefits that a placement student brings to a business?

Placement students are fully integrated into the Cummins family. They are not seen as someone separate from the organisation who needs individual instructions or work plans. Right from the beginning they are integrated into their teams, the greater organisation and companywide.

At Cummins, we talk about career paths and powering everyone’s potential through their career. We aim to hire the best talent and ensure that they are supported and guided throughout their career journey so that they can reach their full potential - and I see that with placement students as well. 

Placement students are such an important part of our talent mix because of the hard work and dedication they bring every day. They are really driven to learn, grow and network with others to learn about other areas of the business as part of their development. They live Cummins values and really benefit the organisation with a fresh perspective. 

Can you tell us about your current placement student Nahiyan?

Nahiyan’s role is in marketing operations. Along with another placement student, they both manage our entire marketing literature life cycle process. This means that when our marketing teams create a brochure, a flyer, a poster, or a product guide, they manage the process. 

Nahiyan’s role includes:

• Managing digital or print marketing literature availability to the sales team, trade shows etc.
• Ensuring that the literature meets the needs of our customers through its entire life cycle
• Working with stakeholders from our global marketing communications organisation
• Liaising with our key suppliers who partner with us on marketing, printing and asset management
• Using digital marketing tools, including our asset management system, marketing literature ordering systems, inventory databases, event product information app and project management software, including system integrations. 

What value has Nahiyan brought to the business? What has been her key successes so far?  

Nahiyan has worked on many continuous improvement projects that have helped our organisation to succeed efficiently and effectively. She brings her critical thinking and creativity skills from her university experience to produce better solutions. She has completed many data analysis projects, using her skills from Excel and other reporting tools to help us make data-driven decisions, which have resulted in a reduction in our literature costs. Nahiyan has also brought a fresh perspective to Cummins by putting together a marketing plan from scratch using her university skills in marketing, planning and research.

Networking is a key part of Nahiyan’s development plan and something she is passionate about maximising during her placement year at Cummins. Nahiyan is great at owning her career journey and what she wants to get out of her placement experience, and networking is a big part of that.

Other successes that Nahiyan has had so far during her placement have included; taking part in a shadowing programme which involved a sales meeting with a customer, networking with our marketing intelligence and sales development programme teams and working on a social media history project. She has also volunteered at an external career fair and with Conscious Youth to help give young people from diverse backgrounds confidence in their public speaking skills, as well as other volunteer activities that utilise her research, advertising and project management background.

Did Nahiyan’s skills exceed your expectations? Did she bring anything from her university background that you were not expecting?  

Nahiyan has exceeded all my expectations, but a few things in particular stand out:

• The way she collaborates, especially in a remote setting
• Her teamwork and communication skills
•  Her proactive approach to stakeholders and customers
• How she engages with people collaboratively and timely
• Her understanding of the different communication channels and how to effectively communicate with others
• How adaptable and quick she is to understanding processes within the company
• Her independence and professionalism
• Finally, her amazing work ethic and attitude to learn. 

I have been so impressed with how much Nahiyan has learnt and grown in the first half of her placement and I am so excited to see where this takes her. I think her future is bright and she would be a strong candidate in any job market she looks toward after completing her degree. The value she brings to Cummins is reflected by the positive feedback she receives daily from our stakeholders and partners. 

What advice would you give to other businesses thinking about taking on a placement student?

I am just one manager, but I would say go for it! You will be amazed at the talent of the young, aspiring professionals at Huddersfield Business School and the dedication, commitment and enthusiasm they can bring to your organisation. 

In my 12-year career at Cummins, collaborating with placement students over the years and now as a manager of placement students, I have always been impressed with what placement students bring to the company. 

If you’re looking to take on a placement student from Huddersfield Business School or would like to find out more information, please email Huddersfield Business School’s Employability and Placements team at businessplacements@hud.ac.uk