In the world of Higher Education, there is a lot of emphasis placed on the need for students to boost their employability. Partly, this comes from the students themselves, who want to leave university ready for the workplace; but it also comes from within, as we want our students to get the best jobs and flourish in their future careers. For this reason, many courses today include the option of an internship or placement. Here at Lancaster – both within the Management School and across the wider University – this normally take the form of a placement year with an employer, where students pause their studies to spend time gaining valuable experience that they can take with them as they enter the working world. THE BEST OPTION? As a Lecturer in the Marketing Department, I am often asked by students whether I think an internship is ‘worth it’ – and whether an internship is the best option for them? In many cases, my answer will be ‘it depends’. After all, it can be a quite competitive process to secure an internship with one of the big names in any industry, and not every student is able to secure the ideal placement that they might have envisaged when they started their journey. In the UK, there are literally hundreds of students from across many universities applying for a very limited number of places at the likes of THG, Microsoft, Time Warner and Volkswagen. Careers teams, like that here in LUMS, can provide valuable guidance and assistance honed over years of going through such undertakings, but there are no guarantees. Even once they start on an internship, students can have mixed experiences – some good, some bad, some even just indifferent. As with many things in life, not every placement is perfect, and sometimes internships do not quite go to plan. For example, the host company may not be fully prepared for the arrival of the intern or may not have a clear idea about what sort of work they may be doing. The host company may even be experiencing its own internal challenges that the student arrives in the middle of. This can pose a real baptism of fire in what is, for many, their first experience of the professional working world. It is not that long ago that some students on internships found themselves on placement amid Covid-19, or going through the process to secure a placement when the pandemic began. This was an issue for all students on placements in all countries the world over. From the university’s side, too, placements can prove a challenge. If the internship is not suitably rewarding, then the student may feel let down by the process and may return to university feeling demotivated for the rest of their degree. While the university may not be responsible for 48 |
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