“My placement helped me achieve a higher grade and get a great graduate job.”
BA (Hons) Business and Enterprise Management graduate Rebecca Malkin took a year-long placement at Johnson & Johnson working as a business operations and legal compliance associate. The skills she learnt during her placement helped her to secure a graduate trainee role with manufacturing company Gripple.
Alongside her studies, Rebecca was president of the enterprise society, course rep, and started her own business with the support of the service which led to her winning the most inspirational student award for entrepreneurship.
“I successfully applied for my placement after receiving a lot of help with my CV from the careers team at Sheffield Hallam. They helped me specialise my CV to the job I was applying for. This really helped — I had a lot of experience that I could reflect on, but I wasn't sure how to condense it into a CV format to show employers the best side of myself.
“On my placement every day was different. I undertook lots of duties, including testing a new business compliance system, building a new SharePoint, working on contracts and presenting to management.
“I really benefited from the day-to-day office activities that you get from going on a placement. I got to meet a lot of people and from day one I was given a lot of responsibility to look after certain projects.
“I think it's really useful for anyone to go on a placement year. It gives you real-world insight so when you come back to uni for your final year you understand the work better. My placement helped me get a better grade in my final year and it also enabled me to get a really good graduate position because I already had real-life experience.
“After my course I was offered a graduate role with Johnson & Johnson, and that's purely through the connections from my placement year. I didn’t take it as I wanted to stay in Sheffield, but my placement also helped me gain my current job. I was able to talk confidently in the interview, and in my first week I was put in charge of a major project because of the software that I'd used in my placement year.”