Industrial Experience Year
For many students who are not certain about what career path they want to follow, an Industrial Experience placement or sandwich year can be an excellent way to help you understand your options and make decisions about your future.
All bachelors degrees in our School include the chance to spend a year in industry with our industrial experience option. The Industrial Experience (IE) year consists of one year spent working in industry in a role that relates directly to your field of study. You would complete your paid work placement with a relevant employer during your third (‘sandwich’) year, returning to Queen Mary for the fourth year of study. A masters degree would be extended to two years, with your second year working in industry.
We have a dedicated Industrial Placements Team who will support you throughout your placement search, liaise with employers and source new vacancies.
See what our students say in the video below:
Frequently asked questions
A year spent in industry has a number of benefits for participating students and many return to university with a new sense of purpose, focus and motivation. A year on placement will help you to develop a range of skills including those directly related to your job as well as more transferable skills such as communication and teamwork. It is also a great opportunity to learn more about your strengths and explore your career aspirations further. By the end of the placement you should have a clearer idea of the skills you have to offer employers in the graduate labour market and a more developed understanding of the career you would like to pursue.
Your placement experience can also give you an edge over other candidates when applying for graduate jobs and helps you to stand out from the crowd. In fact, many placement employers look at placements as a way of testing out the potential of candidates for future employment so a year spent in industry can also lead to a graduate job offer before your final year has even started!
Placement roles must include work that directly relates to your degree subject but can be undertaken across all industry areas in both the private and public sectors. Placement opportunities can be found with large corporations as well as with smaller and medium sized employers. Companies where our students have recently been placed include:
- BBC
- Microsoft
- Accenture
- UBS
- Morgan Stanley
- OVO
- Amazon
- Lloyds
- Virgin Media
- Vodafone
- G-Research
- National Grid
- IBM
- BAE Systems
- Fidelity International
- Johnson Controls
- Expedia
Unfortunately, we cannot guarantee you a placement as the decision to place a student rests entirely with the employer not the School so it is important that you set aside time for researching jobs, making applications and preparing for and attending interviews. However, you are not left on your own to do this as the School has a dedicated Industrial Placement Manager whose role it is to assist you with your placement search, liaise with employers and source new vacancies.
I did my placement as an Associate Software Engineer and was mainly focusing on manual testing. It gave me the opportunity to try out a job and I was also able to see what everybody on my team did in their roles. It gave me a really good idea of what I might want to do in the future.— Lukus, System Architect for Pegasystems , Graduated with....
Undergraduate Summer Internship Module
The School of EECS offers UG students the option to gain academic credit for a summer internship. The internship will take place between June and Sept following the completion of a student’s second year of a three-year degree (BSc/BEng) or the third year of a four-year degree (MSci/MEng);
The exact length of the internship will be dependent on the employer and their business needs. However, we anticipate that the majority of internships will be a minimum of 8 week’s duration; The deadline for a student to secure a summer internship will be May but many employers will recruit much earlier than this.