Portsmouth Business School

FAQ’s

How long do Placements last?

Our undergraduate students require continuous full time work, usually over 12 months. This must take place between the middle of June and the middle of September the following year.

If you wish to keep the student on for longer than the original 12 months this is absolutely fine, but would need to be negotiated between you and the student. Some firms even keep exceptional students on an ongoing one day a week contract during their final year.

How much will it cost to take on a placement student?

The placement is the student’s full time role for the year and as such they do require a salary to live on.

The salary should reflect the role the student is doing, degree of responsibility, location and hours worked. The average salary outside of London is around £15k and inside London this goes up to around £17k.

Many companies add on additional benefits to the salary ranging from, sign on bonuses, free parking / health care / gym membership, accommodation etc, but as with taking on any employee the details of the benefits package are open to negotiation between you and the candidate.

What sort of jobs can students do?

Due to the variety of courses that offer the opportunity to undertake a placement year we have students from all business disciplines looking to gain valuable experience and contribute to your organisations success. In addition to the students subject specific skills, transferable skills such as team work, communication, presentation, time management and organisational are also developed on every degree course. Further to this all our students have a high standard of IT skills and many have additional language skills.

Examples of  business areas students have worked within for their placement years include;

Accounting
Administration
Communications
Customer services
Economics
Events Management
Finance
Human Resources
Law
Management Accounting
Management Consulting
Management Trainee
Marketing
Purchasing
Project Management
Supply Chain
Sales
Web Design

 

Will students require a lot of supervision?

Although monitoring and guidance is required, many students are self-starters and will not require detailed daily supervision. However, we would always suggest using a thorough recruitment method to insure you get the student best suited to succeeding in your organisation.

When should we start to advertise our placement vacancies?

The recruitment process can be conducted at any time from the start of October until the end of August. However we would suggest you keep it within the academic year, October through to May. Many organisations, in order to have a greater choice of students, will start their recruitment process earlier in the year. However, it is also important to consider that 50% of the vacancies we advertise each year close in January and February and having a closing date outside of these two months is likely to result in higher application as you will have less competition from other vacancies. Also, it is highly advisable that you do not have closing dates or hold interview etc during the exam periods, as the response rate from students is generally low during this time.

What should we include in our Vacancy Advert?

Due to using an online notice board we can advertise out a huge amount of information about your vacancies and your organisation. All we require to do this is have a word or PDF document containing your vacancy advert emailed through to pbs.placements@port.ac.uk.

As a minimum you should include the following information within your advert;

Company Name:       
Job Title:        
Business Area:
Location:                   
Salary:                       
Closing Date:              

And then a paragraph on;

Company Information
Job Description
Person Specification
How to Apply

If you have not advertised a placement before and are unsure what to include and how to lay it out please download our vacancy advert template.