Joe Carter, BA Business Management, Placement Year at SAP
Focus of Final Year
Being in a working environment for a year gives you a lot of invaluable experience that will help you when you return for your final year. The working environment is very different to being at university; it is often fast paced and you are often under a lot of pressure, which means you have to be disciplined and be able to work independently. Students on placement often receive a huge amount of responsibility and are expected to make a real impact on the business that they work for, which teaches you to be focussed and organised.
Students note that this experience helps them massively when they return to university for their final year studies, and Placement students often achieve better grades.
As well as being more disciplined, placement students also note that they have much more commercial knowledge and understanding of what is happening in the ‘business world’, which means they have more references to call upon and use in their final year modules.
Putting theory into Practice
Having now done two years of studying a specific discipline, you now have the opportunity to really leverage the knowledge and skills that you have picked up at uni. Being equipped with this knowledge and understanding allows you to integrate into any business very quickly and make a real impact. Employers are looking for students that will add a new perspective or a different way of seeing things to an organisation, and when you are armed to the teeth with concepts and theories you have a real chance to do this. Also, once you have graduated, if you can demonstrate to a graduate employer that you not only have strong business/accounting knowledge, but you have experience of applying this in a real business context, it will help to make you a really distinctive candidate.
To ask Joe or any of the other Placement Ambassadors about doing a placement year, email mgt.plambassadors@sheffield.ac.uk . You can also drop-in to the Employability Hub to speak to the Employability team.