Placement years

Hi @Dhshsnsksnskxn ,
Placement years tend to be highly beneficial for several reasons. It provides hands-on experience, allowing you to apply theoretical knowledge in real-world settings, which enhances your understanding and skills. Completing a placement year can also significantly boost your CV, making you more employable to future employers, and many students secure job offers from their placement companies. Additionally, it helps build a professional network, which can be advantageous for future job searches. Most universities have long-term connections with some companies, so it’s unlikely to become obsolete, and the skills and connections gained can provide long-term career benefits. Unfortunately I don’t have much to say specifically regarding the engineering placement year, perhaps you could attend an open day before applying and ask questions in person. I personally, would recommend as someone who’s studies a placement integrated course.
Hope this helps.
Mercy
BCU Student Rep

Are university placement years worth it? I feel like after a student gets their first job in their chosen sector the placement year will become obsolete, however I understand that for some degrees employability is a huge problem. I'm applying for electrical and electronic engineering, can anyone help me to decide if I should do a placement year?

Lead engineer here who hires engineering students and graduates every year for a global energy company, who also happens to have graduated with electronic engineering degree a few years back and who's done an engineering internship.
I'd like to clarify a couple things: The industrial placement does not need to be formally integrated into your degree from the get go. If you happen to find a placement during your 2nd or 3rd year at Uni then you simply ask to change your course from a normal one to the one with the integrated placement year. You can also do the internship after you graduate if you can't find one before that.
Basically, the fact that a student is on a degree with the "integrated year in industry" does not guarantee anything, and is more of a way for universities to look more attractive to potential students. In reality is does nothing, as every student will have full support from the University's employability teams.
Personally when I started my degree I wasn't even aware that such courses with integrated years in industry existed, and when I eventually got a placement job offer I simply asked the University team to switch me to that and that was done quickly without any fuss at all.
Now regarding whether or not you should do it it's entirely up to you.
Yes you are right that if a graduate manages to secure themselves a graduate role then it obviously renders any attempt to do an internship useless as well as a perceived waste of time, HOWEVER, by doing a 12 month placement you increase your odds of getting not just a job, but a job working for a great company by so much it's not even close.
Personally, I'd rather hire someone with Bachelor's degree who's done a year in industry, compared to someone with Masters but no real work experience.
it's all subjective and there are obviously times and plenty of reasons for my statement to be false, but on absolute average I'd say engineering internship experience is much more valuable than a masters degree on its own.
Valuable not only from the perspective of you gaining lots of extremely valuable hands-on experience, which increases your potential value to the business as a professional, but also from your perspective since you get a chance to grow your professional network within the organisation during those 12 months, which on its own has an immense positive impact on your career.
Dare I say that if I hadn't done my internship I wouldn't have been able to be in the position I am in right now.
Regarding the "employability problem", I also would like to clarify that, and I know many students, especially unsuccessful ones, would like to disagree, but from employer perspective I can say with full confidence that we struggle to find the right candidate every single year. We would love to hire more people, but even after all the recruitments rounds (ATS, online tests, hr screening, video interview, phone calls, face to face interviews) we still struggle to identify any good candidates.
You will probably read on the internet, especially places like Reddit, where people write sob stories about how they applied to 200 jobs and haven't gotten a single reply back. The thing that these people forget (or most likely omit from their story on purpose) is that their resume is not as great as they think and they failed to demonstrate their technical and/or soft skills during the interview process, which is why they failed to find a job, not because the market is oversaturated and "no one wants to hire good engineers anymore".
Also, what many students forget or don't know, is that they apply to places that have extreme level of competition simply because those are the companies the general public is most aware of, think Tesla, Nvidia, Microsoft, IBM, GE, F1, Rolls Royce, Boeing, etc., etc., but they forget that engineering of all specialities are needed in every industry - healthcare (someone's gotta design and build them MRI machines right?), energy (renewables, power generation, power transmission, oil & gas, nuclear, etc.), aerospace, defence, construction, infrastructure, manufacturing of all sorts, rail and other transportation, telecommunications, etc., etc.
I normally suggest checking out gradcracker to see what kind of industries, companies and opportunities are out there.
To answer your question on whether you should do an internship - it depends, but personally I would heavily suggest that you do. I would never consider such time spent as a time wasted, worst case scenario it will make you better as a professional and will help immensely during your final year(s) at Uni.
In my case I basically "skipped" the whole automation and control unit on my final year simply because I already learnt most of the content during my internship year just by working on the projects, which just by itself freed up so much of my time that I redirected it to getting better grades in other modules as well as spent more time on applying for graduate level jobs and programmes.
Please feel free to ask any questions, I'm more than happy to help.
-Al