Across this blog series, I have often discussed university efforts to embed employability into the curriculum through seeking authentic engagement and learning experiences to support students’ preparation for life beyond university. Prospective and current students have highlighted that one of the top reasons for choosing to study at university is the motivation to gain access to the graduate job market (See studies from UniFrog, 2021; Canvas, 2021; UUK, 2017; Unite, 2017). As universities work hard to support student development to fulfil this motivation, the UK policy context also continues to measure the graduate outcomes of students through national surveying, where all alumni are asked about their graduate occupation fifteen months following their degree. These measures feed into national university league tables and government scrutiny, creating pressure for course teams who are increasingly looking for interventions that support students’ development of skills, add experiences to their résumé, and create networks that could lead to graduate employment.
Placements – the gold standard for employability intervention
Often the highest regarded solution to support graduates’ employability is supporting students to access work experience (a.k.a. placements). These can be short or long in timeframe, with ‘placement light’ options including one-week internships, employer-led consultancy projects, and work shadowing. The most intensive of these experiences is the ‘year in industry’, also often referred to as the ‘sandwich year’. Work experience opportunities have been cited to substantially enhance students’ graduate prospects (HighIn, 2025, Highfliers Research, 2023). Then there are professionally accredited programmes which require placements (such as teaching, social work and medicine), during which students will take several full-time placements for a number of weeks during their degree and where performance in a workplace forms part of the summative assessment. Work experiences are now highly varied to support student engagement with these opportunities. I’ve provided the list below to offer a summary menu of the many opportunities that can be offered for students:
• Work Shadowing: A very short term (up to 1 week) unpaid opportunity to observe a professional work environment and gain a better understanding of a person’s job role.
• Internships: Between 2-12 weeks and can be undertaken part-time alongside studies or in vacations. Students work on real projects. These roles can be paid or unpaid.
• Employer projects: are usually short term (1 – 4 weeks) opportunities to work with an employer or a client to solve an issue set by them. Often called Innovation Projects, Live Briefs or Student Employer Projects are where students “act as a consultant”.
• Year in Employment (also called: placement year, sandwich year, or year in industry): This is a temporary role that lasts up to 12 months and is usually paid. This role in an organisation can often make up part of a students’ university degree through tying it into a summative assessment.
• Volunteering: An unpaid role within a charitable organisation, that can last for any amount of time that enables students to help a community and, at the same time, build students’ experiences and skills for their CVs.
(George and Lowe, 2026)
Engaging Students in Placement Preparation
A recent webinar from Simac discussed best practice in engaging students in placements. Fran Rimmer from the University of Huddersfield began by talking about the need to be student-centred in placement preparation, including preparing students for failure in job application, broadening horizons beyond academic disciplines, and the importance of working with academics to bring placements into the curriculum. Mike Head from the University of Southampton built on this, discussing the ‘Successful Futures’ programme and how this initiative was strategically embedding employability and work experience into the curriculum, bringing career-thinking earlier in the student journey. However, engaging students in preparing for placements is easier said than done. At the University of Westminster in the last academic year, we have tackled this through running a core module focused on increasing student awareness of graduate and placement opportunities, which included tasking students with completing a placement job application as a summative assessment. Following investing time and effort into encouraging students to apply for work experience, many students will go on to experience a great variety of work experience opportunities, where each opportunity is individual and students may find themselves learning on the job far away from campus.
Student engagement when away on placement
Gaining an understand of student engagement through attendance check-ins is a clear priority for many institutions, where such data supports management decisions and informs student-support activity. When in a classroom or campus based activity this is more straight forward, but it is different in the context of a work experience placement. A student cohort is no longer together in a single location, they are spread across geographical locations, often in different counties and sometimes even countries. For an institution to gain an understanding of whether a student is engaging with their placement, the employer has previously been asked to monitor a student, however there is a delay in this information, and increasingly stretched public services may take this additional management and workload implication as one task too many. Further, many employers are in complex settings such as hospital wards, schools, building sites and even non-phone laboratories, which can prevent further engagement measures being put in place. These constraints are also to be found in busy, fast-paced workplaces, or in workplace contexts in which remote managers are not working alongside the student physically. The potential perception of continually checking in and reporting back to the institution being a nuisance means that finding means to assess student engagement across a placement can be difficult.
Work experience recording priority for visa holding students
Then there are regulatory reasons to assess students’ engagement with placements too. International students share the student motivation for graduate careers as a result of attending higher education, where the desire for work experience is perhaps higher than home students. If a student is undertaking a credit bearing work experience as part of their degree, international students are able to work more hours than the UK Visa and Immigration policy allowance of 20 hours per week. However, in light of this, the importance of understanding and recording student engagement is even greater for these students, as they must comply with regulatory requirements. Solutions include employer timesheets, online work logs on virtual learning environments, and tutor visits – but there is clearly space for more innovation in this area.
Students as the centre of work experience
Work experience and placements in industry are a rich and positive means to improve students understanding of the professions and world beyond university, and additionally provide a tangible experience to their résumé. Supporting students equally during these work experiences should be an equal priority as supporting students on campus studies – but the distance can be a real challenge. Beyond understanding students’ attendance and recording regulatory duties for international students, there are other key considerations for us to bear in mind. How are we supporting students’ belonging to the university while they are off site? How are we supporting students’ wellbeing and academic studies at distance? And finally, how are we supporting students in their return to studies?
As the desire to increase student participation in work experience and placements grows in both students and universities, asking these questions is important, particularly when considering non-traditional placements such as remote placements from students’ home, or placements internationally.
Tom Lowe has researched and innovated in student engagement across diverse settings for over ten years, in areas such as student voice, retention, employability and student-staff partnership. Tom works at the University of Westminster as Assistant Head of School (Student Experience) in Finance and Accounting where he leads on student experience, outcomes and belonging. Tom is also the Chair of RAISE, a network for all stakeholders in higher education for researching, innovating and sharing best practice in student engagement. Prior to Westminster, Tom was a Senior Lecturer in Higher Education at the University of Portsmouth and previously held leadership positions for engagement and employability at the University of Winchester. Tom has published two books on student engagement with Routledge; ‘A Handbook for Student Engagement in Higher Education: Theory into Practice’ in 2020 and ‘Advancing Student Engagement in Higher Education: Reflection, Critique and Challenge’ in 2023, and has supported over 40 institutions in consultancy and advisory roles internationally
References
Canvas, 2021. State of Student Success and Engagement in Higher Education: 2020 Global Research Study and Trends. 16th September 2020. Retrieved from: https://www.instructure.com/canvas/en-gb/resources/business-schools/state-of-student-success-engagement
George, L., Lowe, T. (2026). The Student’s Guide to Career Planning and Employability. Sage; London.
High Fliers Research (2023). The Graduate Market in 2023: Annual Review of Graduate Vacancies & Starting Salaries at the UK’s Leading Employers. London: High Fliers Research.
Higherin (2025). What is a Placement? [Website]. Available at: https://higherin.com/schemes/placements
Unifrog, 2021. Skills & Enterprise 2021: A report on students’ skills development and attitudes towards their future careers. Retrieved from: https://cdn.unifrog.org/downloads/Skills-Enterprise-UK-report.pdf
Unite, 2017. Student Resilience: Unite Students Insight Report. Available at: http://www.unite-group.co.uk/sites/default/files/2017-03/student-insight-report-2016.pdf
Universities United Kingdom [UUK], 2017. Education, consumer rights and maintaining trust: what students want from their university. Retrieved from: http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/reports/Pages/what-students-want-from-their-university.aspx
