Caitlin
Billingham

How employability services helped me secure my placement

The employability services at NTU are award winning, yet they are so underused by students. For me, the employability services have been especially useful when applying for work placements in my sandwich year.

Firstly, all of the placements I have applied to, I have found on InPlace: a tool that signposts students to placement opportunities and can be used for direct applications. I study Psychology with Criminology and there are many relevant placements such as working with data in the police. There are also NHS voluntary placements available. While job searching, I have noticed a variety of placement types in different fields.

Additionally, the live chat function on the employability website is very useful. I requested help with my CV and was given a Teams meeting almost immediately. In this meeting, I showed the person helping me my CV and they gave me very useful, personal feedback and advise. This help has led to me getting placement interviews. The online CV services are also very useful as it manually checks through your CV and highlights potential issues.

When it came to preparing the interview the employability services were once again useful. Interview 360 gave me practise interview questions to do video replies for. You can then look back on these and look at advice about answering the question. The best thing this gave me was confidence as it made me realise that I am able to answer questions well and on the spot. In addition, the interview preparation checklist allows you to make sure you have everything ready and have enough information and possible answers to questions. I then printed this off and had it on my wall behind me for the online interview, which was very useful.

These are just the services that have proven most valuable to me during my placement applications however, many more on the employability website have been very useful and there is a range of tools to make sure you are well prepared for employment opportunities, whether this is a placement, a part-time job at university or post-graduation jobs.

Students should definitely take advantage of all the employability tools and opportunities available, as they are very helpful and valuable.