April Call Back afternoon at Royal Holloway

 It was great to see our placement students on April 7th at our 2nd Call Back afternoon of the year. We have over 70 business students out on placement, our largest cohort to date, and we were delighted that the majority of these had managed to secure time off from their placement companies to attend our workshops - one even came in from Scotland. The sun was shining at Royal Holloway and Dr Kerrie Howard, the Year in Business Director, and myself, were impressed to hear of what our students have been achieving on placement.

Students who attended were undertaking a range of Business, Marketing, Finance/ Accounting, Sales, HR and Project Management placements. The companies they represented included Ascot Wealth Management, AzkoNobel, Bayer, Boeing, Cancer Research, Elida Gibbs, Enterprise Mobility, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Hilton, Honda, L’Oreal, Network Rail, NHS, Pernod Ricard, SAP, Siemens, SLB, The Walt Disney Company, TJX, Unilever, Volkswagen, Wyndham Hotel group and many, many more including several local companies.

Most of these students have now been with their placement organisations for nine months or more and are clearly gaining huge benefits from the placement experience in terms of the projects they are getting involved in and skills they are developing. This includes getting into the routine of the working day which will certainly help on their return to University in the Autumn - no late nights or mornings lazing about in bed for these students on workdays. Students have been undertaking real and interesting work with quite a lot of responsibility from day one and the need to juggle different priorities.

The afternoon included a discussion on the challenges students had faced on placement and 2 interactive workshops on the Academic assessment they have to complete as part of their placement. Students must produce a personal development portfolio which illustrates how they have developed competencies while on placement and a poster, which links their experience on placement to a Management theory they studied during their first 2 years at University.

The competency workshop was led by Career Consultant Jo Edmondson. Thinking about competencies the students have mastered, or found difficult on placement, and articulating these via the STAR format, has the additional advantage of being useful for students when applying for their Graduate positions. Often being able to articulate the difficult things which have been mastered can make for some of the best examples for discussion in interview. The poster workshop, led by Dr Kerrie Howard, gave the students the chance to discuss draft examples and recommend how to improve these both in terms of content and visual appearance.

A massive thank you to all the students for attending and we look forward to seeing you all at our Reintegration meeting in the Autumn term when returning for the final year. Enjoy the remainder of your placements!