Whether you choose to do a year long or summer placement you’ll leave with more direction and scope, and perhaps even an offer of employment

Why did you decide to do a Year in Industry?

In an already competitive graduate job market, a pandemic induced recession will shift the landscape, worsening job prospects in certain areas while improving them in others. Hence, it is now more important than ever to leave university with plentiful, high quality work experience, standing you out amongst hundreds of other candidates. Whether you choose to do a year long or summer placement you’ll leave with more direction and scope, and perhaps even an offer of employment.

What did you enjoy about your placement?

My year-long placement at ExxonMobil allowed me to become an expert in my area, plant information engineering, that, over time, more experienced engineers could turn to for help. This was satisfying in itself but also exposed me to numerous technical experts, a great developmental opportunity!

Tell us about project(s) which you have been most involved with whilst on year in industry?

A placement is not simply about putting your CV on the top of the pile, but reinforcing your studies. The placement gave me a chance to identify and build skills highly desirable in industry. I was originally disappointed to discover my role involved elements of data science and programming, instead of the more traditional chemical engineering I had been expecting. This forced me into a steep learning curve to adapt and develop my IT skills before approaching a larger project to develop a breakdown viewer for optimisation software using Excel Visual Basic. The viewer allowed Contact Engineers to more efficiently identify process controls to change, resulting in reduced lost opportunity. Alongside use of other software (MS Access, advanced Excel, Siemens PSPPM, Honeywell’s Uniformance package), this helped me identify a gap in my prior learnings and as a result my final year focus will shift to developing modelling, programming and other digital skills.

What was the highlight of your experience?

In addition to the divergence in technical skill requirements, I’ve found the working environment to be significantly different to in academia, with a hierarchical structure and more economically oriented goals, interactions with colleagues are more formal and the work faster paced. Although admittedly not for everyone, this often gave me clearer direction, increased productivity and allowed me to see genuinely useful outcomes to my work, providing much motivation to my day. As an engineer, seeing positive physical change implemented to the UK’s largest oil refinery as a direct result of my work made for the highlight of my placement: investigating causes of, and solutions to, a pair of faulty valves allowed me to improve the safety, economic and environmental aspects of a process.

Overall, the biggest take-away from any placement is a fundamentally better understanding of how your theoretical learnings apply in an industrial context, whatever that may be. I’ve left with the most up to date information, skills and motivation to inform my career direction, which has since proved invaluable when searching for graduate roles and undertaking interviews.