My Experience with Year In Industry (Placements)

If there were two things I would say to every person going into, or considering an Industry Year it would be:

• If you want to do something ask
• Just because you do not get a return offer does not mean you did not perform well

Doing a "Year in Industry" (Placement Year) was one of the most important experiences of my University life. This article aims to answer some popular questions I've had about my placement year as well as give some key advice to people considering placement.

The Background

I worked at LexisNexis Risk Solutions as a "Placement Data Scientist", this was under their professional services team, which meant I was in a customer facing role, and was delivering work for customers. The main tools I used were Python for data processing, and Big Data Warehouse technologies. Common machine learning algorithms, such as regression models or trees were used for client pieces where appropriate.

What does Day One look like?

This was an "induction day", throughout which I had a couple presentations about the company, the work, and clients I might be dealing with as well as meet and greets with multiple teams. The most impactful thing that, however, was meeting the previous years placements, our contracts were 13 months long, the final month is overlapped with the start of the new placements. This gives a month worth of skills handover and networking time, which really gave me an edge in both my client work and communication with the team. If I were to build my own placement programme, I would include this as well.

Prior Experience?

A common question is whether I had any prior experience, for the purposes of the jobs I was applying for I had no paid prior experience, I was an Ambassador for Intel's OneAPI and I was a "Peer Tutor" (essentially a class assistant or PA) for my university classes. But I had not worked in a proper corporate environment before. what I did have, was:

• Passion
• Projects
• Presentation Skills

The first two come as a pair, you cannot work beyond your university brief, or beyond the curriculum if you do not enjoy what you do, as such your extra projects, and GitHub Profile can really help set you apart to other applicants who may have a great set of grades but do not show the same level of passion, enthusiasm, and drive to learn as you do.

As for presentation skills, this came from practice during education, and in general I enjoy talking about what I do, this especially for a consultancy-esc placement like mine, is a key skill to have, and even if you're not in a client role, being able to talk about the value you add is super important life skill that can make sure you get recognition you deserve.

The search for a placement

I began my search for a placement in Mid November 2024, which was during my 2nd Year of Undergraduate studies. I had started my search due to my housemate obtaining his offer from IBM during this time, and this had kicked my into gear in order to start my own search. The whole process took up until January the following year, where I ended up with two different offers of employment. One for Software Engineering, and another as a Data Scientist. I ended up accepting the Data Scientist offer, as it was more closely aligned to what I wanted to do.

During my job search I faced many challenges, the biggest one I had was managing the number of technical stages, I was in a fortunate position where I ended up with 3 or 4 technical stages (of various difficulty) all due at roughly the same time, this was not ideal, and if I were to go back and give myself a piece of advice it would be to stagger interviews so you do not have so many steps back to back.

Another challenge I had faced was knowing what exactly interviewers or recruiters wanted from an application, this, unfortunately is not something that I have the answer to. However, I will say that something I always asked at the end of an interview was "Is there anything on my CV that would make you not hire me?", this question got mixed reactions, some interviewers loved the confidence that it gave, others were surprised that I had asked it. All of them gave feedback, which meant each interview I had, each application I had after was better than the previous. I believe this question, along with having the confidence to ask it, is one of the reasons I have done well in interviews, from placement to experiences beyond.

The process(es)

In tech, different companies, from different levels have varying degrees of difficultly and length of process. Going into industry placement, I was certain that for most mid sized or competitive companies there is no reason to have more than 3 rounds of interviews, having done a placement and competing in the grad market, I still hold this opinion. As such many of the processes I went through simply looked like this:

• Initial call with recruiter
  • Do I understand the role?
  • Does this role align?
• Initial Technical Stage
  • I always made sure to get in front of a human as soon as possible
  • This was either a small programming task, or discussion around my prior work
• Take home assessment
  • Due to the client facing roles I was applying for this also included prepping a presentation
  • In one such case there was no take home assessment, but I did need to present an already existing piece of work.
    • For this I chose TheoryOfComputingGUI.
• Final Interview
  • Present take home assessment

I was very fussy in my application process, I did not want to overwork my self before signing a contract, as such I refused to write a cover letter, even during graduate jobs I stand by this opinion, they're often not read and really just a tick box from the hiring firm.

After placement

Going back into my final year of university was a shock, the loss of regular income and loss of some luxuries (such as only sharing with one person), really hit me hard, for those who go into placement and start enjoying themselves, its important to keep in mind this might happen to you. As such it took me a month or so before I felt like I was back in the "university mind set". But rest assured, a couple times out with my friends, and back to the study grind and any feeling of "going backwards" had soon disappeared.

Another thing that happened, which leads into the "don't ask, don't get" advice, is I ended up working part time for my placement company throughout my final year, about mid way through my placement I asked if this possible, and 4 or so months later I got confirmation not only that it was possible, but they would love to have me continue. This really set me apart in the graduate market, a future blog post will go into detail about how I coped with 20 hour work weeks, plus university and social life. But the whole experience was rewarding, and I would recommend it to any one who thinks they can do it.