How our Placement Years Helped us Achieve First-class Degrees
Hi! We’re Joanne & Talia, and we are First-Class graduates in BA (Hons) Events Management and BA (Hons) Business and Marketing. During our undergraduate degree, we both undertook placement years in Huddersfield Business School’s Marketing Team. Although we both gained countless new skills, gained invaluable experience, and continued working in our roles after our placements, the academic benefits were clear and resulted in us being awarded first-class degrees. In this blog, we will share the key academic advantages of undertaking a placement year.
It was perfect timing!
My name is Talia and I graduated with a first-class degree from BA (Hons) Events Management in 2019. After initially accepting a placement elsewhere, I realised it wasn’t right for me, so I applied for the Events and Communications Assistant role in Huddersfield Business School’s Marketing team and was successful! This role was perfect for me as it gave me the hands-on events management experience that I wouldn’t have been able to gain from my course alone. After struggling with my confidence and studies throughout my second year of university, my placement year couldn’t have come at a better time! It made me feel confident about the work I was producing and helped improve my confidence. When my placement year came to an end, I felt re-energised, motivated, and ready to take on my final year, something I never thought I’d feel! I was asked to continue working part-time in the role throughout my final year, a job that would lead me to take on a full-time job in the team as Events and Communications Coordinator.
The only way is up
I’m Joanne and I have recently graduated from the University of Huddersfield with a first-class degree in BA (Hons) Business and Marketing. During my second year of university, I applied for multiple placement roles, however, they weren’t the right fit for me. I applied for the role of Marketing and Engagement Assistant at Huddersfield Business School as the job description entailed social media management which is a key interest of mine. My placement changed me completely! I excelled in the tasks I was set, my confidence skyrocketed, and I gained countless skills. When it was time to begin my final year of university, I was fortunate enough to continue working part-time within the team, which enabled me to continue developing my marketing skills, enhancing my employability further, and using my experiences from both work and my studies, to complement each other. I am now undertaking a Master's degree in digital marketing while continuing with my role within the team.
So, how does a placement year help you achieve a first-class degree?
The school encourages all students to undertake a placement year to develop their employability and academic skills. Almost 70% of our students who undertook a work placement achieved a First in their degrees, highlighting the academic benefits of a placement year. Let’s take a look at the advantages of taking on a placement year:
1) Improvement in Work Ethic
After working 9-5 for an entire year on placement, the longer lectures and late-night library sessions didn’t seem that bad when we started our final year. Especially when our dissertation deadlines were looming. The full days spent working on it just felt like a day of working from home and was not as exhausting as before, due to enhanced work ethics. We also noticed that we put more effort into our university work and went that extra mile to achieve higher because of how hard we had worked on our placements, we knew we were more than capable.
2) Improved Time Management
Waking up early for work can be a shock when you first start your placement year (we weren’t used to those early mornings!) however, you quickly get used to the new routine. This made going back to university so much easier as we were still in the routine and those 9:15am lectures were not as difficult, as there were times when we had to be at work for 7am! Also, whilst working for an organisation, there are often deadlines that must be met, and this made meeting those final-year assignment deadlines so much easier!
We also made use of organisational software used on placement such as Trello, which was extremely beneficial for splitting up big assignments, organising tasks and assigning mini deadlines to ensure time-related targets were met.
3) Applying Real-World Experience to Assignments
During our placement years, we were able to apply the theory and concepts we had learned on our courses to our day-to-day work lives. Equally, we gained hands-on experience which would not have been possible from our courses alone. The practical skills we gained in our roles allowed us to have a new perspective towards our university work. Everything from business terminology to social media management, to event organisation enhanced our assignments as we were no longer using hypothetical examples, but instead using our own experiences to make our points. Additionally, learning how to write business reports and conduct social media audits helped improve our grades as we now understood how to analyse data and how to interpret it to make recommendations.
4) Improve Confidence
We were unconfident people going into our placement years, but we saw the difference in ourselves as the year went by. We noticed little changes such as being able to communicate better with colleagues, leading meetings, and sharing our ideas with colleagues. Therefore, our confidence in our university work and our abilities improved due to the amount of encouragement we were given during our placement years. We felt confident enough to push ourselves in our final year assignments and became more involved when working on group projects. We were more motivated as we were confident in our knowledge.
5) Critical Thinking
Critical thinking is a key part of writing assignments at university, but also in working life. You need to have the ability to analyse facts and make judgements to problem-solve and make decisions more effectively. Having to think strategically and quickly to solve problems at work helped us to write our final year assignments more critically.
Final thoughts
We both noticed the changes within ourselves upon completing our placement years and the confidence we gained helped us in so many ways, most importantly by giving us an enhanced skill set which helped improve our academic performance. If you can, we highly recommend undertaking a placement year for all the reasons we’ve mentioned above but also because it improves your chances of graduate employment – we're both working at Huddersfield Business School off the back of our placement years!
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