Why a student placement is an amazing opportunity

Student placements are an excellent chance to test out your career plans, and get experience in your field.

Aidana studies International Business Management at the University of Gloucestershire.

As part of her course, she took a placement at Endsleigh this spring.

Aidana shares what she learnt and how she got involved with key projects: 

Endsleigh Insurance is a Cheltenham-based UK insurance intermediary, specialising in the student, education, graduate and sport markets.

My Cyber Risk project at Endsleigh Insurance company was focused on industry-driven research and development within security risk assessment, cybersecurity, software quality, model-driven analysis and development, as well as empirical research on methods and tools.”

What did the work placement involve?

In this work placement, my contribution was to gather the information from financial businesses and write a report about the cyber risk in our customer’s environment.

A lot of businesses hold customer data, so there is a lot of risks to consider.

What challenges did you face?

The main challenge I faced was working in an environment where English wasn’t my first language.

Being an international student,  I tend to go overboard with my language skills. However, I received a lot of support to manage this day-to-day.

I admit to being a bit of a perfectionist – I take a great deal of pride in my work and I’m committed to producing the highest-quality work. The challenge here was not to be too particular and it’s not always practical to try and perfect your work.

Sometimes you have to decide what’s important and ignore the rest in order to be productive.

What did you learn?

In an overall perspective of the project, I learned a lot about myself and how I work in an office, which will help me for future employability.

I believe that my work experience, outside of this academic setting, will play the most crucial role in terms of succeeding in my personal and professional life.

I want to say, as an international learner, don’t panic, just find ways to improve your skills and don’t be afraid to ask for help in doing so.

From this point of view, meeting new people in the project was a great experience – I made new friends, from my class and other from around campus too.

During my study course, my plan is to seek an opportunity to undertake a placement at Endsleigh.

For more career advice explore what smart graduates follow when job hunting or even how social media can help towards employability.

If you’re interested in studying at the University of Gloucestershire, please speak to your Education Counsellor.