Placements and Internships

Programme9.15-9.30 Arrival with coffee

9.30-10.00 Welcomes, introductions, overview, scope

10.00-11.00 Policy Overview

11.00-12.00 Panel Discussion

12.00-12.30 Coffee and comment

12.30-1.30 Case Studies

1.30-2.15 Lunch

2.15 – 3.15 Workshop

3.15-3.30 Coffee break

3.30-4.00 Final comment and close

Welcome! Brief introductions.

Who are you, what is your role and why are you interested in the topic of placements and internships? What do you want to find out?

Order of play

• ASHPIT – whats and whys• Learning Outcomes• Workshop Themes• Definitions – are we doing placements, internships or live

briefs?• Internships in policy and strategy- some key documents• CBI, RCUK, Vitae The future of the UK research base and

implications for the professional and career development of researchers, June 2011 – imperatives to act

• Challenges in setting up internships• Headlines• Case Studies• Workshop

ASHPIT – What and Why

• embedding and sustaining best practice;

• bringing together good practice that has evolved during the period of Roberts’ funding;

• supporting capacity-building through sharing resources;

• complement the existing Vitae regional hub model

• support Vitae in responding to policy (e.g. the recommendations of the Hodge Review 2011)

• making good networks and building supportive relationships for the future!

Policy is important because….• it shows us how we fit into the bigger picture (in terms of national

policy and institutional policy);• it informs evidence-based practice (helps us keep up with trends and

ensures on-going relevance to researchers and employers);• it gives us the information we need to write successful funding bids;

We need to read policy for:• Trends (alumni, entrepreneurship, widening participation,

employer-led curricula, placements and internships);• Themes (discipline-sensitivity; STEM bias);• Funding opportunities and/or opportunities for collaborative

practice (ASHPIT; AHRC/ESRC, Vitae, LEPs?)

Why Policy Matters

Learning Outcomes for this sessionBy the end of this session you will have:

• been introduced to key policy and strategy documents which refer to the importance of placements and internships as they relate to HE overall and to researchers and early career research staff in particular

What is said about placements and internship? What are the implications for us?• been introduced to some examples of good practice in placements and

internship practice; What is it? How is it being done?

• considered some of the challenges in running placement/ internship schemes with ASH researchers and employers; How can we do it well?

• worked collaboratively to think about innovative ways of developing placements, internships and other live briefs and trouble-shot them in groups

How can we develop good, sustainable, scalable good practice that is open to enough researchers to make our time investment worthwhile.

Workshop themes

Might include…..Academic placements – HE is ASH’s biggest recruiter. What kind of ‘live brief’ is the most appropriate to give researchers experience of the sector?

Scalability – Is it worth my time and resource investment? How can I get more out for the time I put in?!

What do we think about embedding industry experience into PhD? What does your institution think about this? How is BBSRC’s PIPs going down?

Can we work cross-institutionally to offer meaningful experience to researchers of the kind of collaborative, multi-disciplinary work that characterises the ‘flexible and mobile’ researcher? How would it work? What challenges would there be?

Is international placement experience just too complicated to organise? What could make it simpler?

Look at the recommendations that came out of the CBI review. How might that translate into practice?

What can research-intensives learn from more vocationally-oriented HEIs? And how can they learn it?

How do you develop the hard-to-reach skills of leadership and strategic awareness when a placement is usually discrete and short term?

Placements and Internships:

Issues of definitionInternships: A sponsored trial of a prospective employee.Robin Mellors-Bourne, Vitae Engaging Employers Event, November 8th 2011 & BIS Common Best Practice Code for High-Quality Internships, July 2011

Can include: undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate placements:internships may take place during vacation periods, in between courses or after a student has finished higher educationBIS Common Best Practice Code for High-Quality Internships, July 2011

Lasting at least six weeks to no longer than 12 months (one year), but will typically last around three months BIS Common Best Practice Code for High-Quality Internships, July 2011 but bear in mind sector definitions vary – see CCSC draft guidelines

Placements and Internships

A Work Experience Placement: a specific period of work experience related to the participant’s course of study, organised either by the educational institution or the individual, and which may be paid or unpaid. The purpose is the gain of skills by the participant, particularly relating to their potential employability, and this may be assessed.Evaluation of Graduate Talent Pool Internships, BIS, January 2011

Students undertaking work placements of up to one yearas part of a higher education course of study are not classified as workers and are exempt from NMW regulationsBIS Common Best Practice Code for High-Quality Internships, July 2011

Placements and Internships

Live Brief: A real (paid?) project responding to a business need. Often used in vocational A&D courses.

Voluntary Work:Volunteers are under no obligation to perform work or carry out instructions: they have no contract or formal arrangement and so can come and go as they please; they have no expectation of and do not receive any reward for the work they do.

Placements and Internships

Secondment: Temporarily changing roles within the same company. The change could last any length of time and could lead to new employment opportunities for the person concerned. It is not necessary to change jobs completely in order to maximise these sorts of opportunity, so secondment offers members of staff who are happy in their current company or workplace the chance to try something new.

http://188.92.136.63/careers-advice/careers-advice/593/going-on-secondment (Jobs.ac.uk )

Is an internship work? Is an internee a worker?

Yes. ‘Worker’ has a legal definition and depends upon the existence of a contract of employment or any other contract to personally perform work or services. These contracts can be written, oral or implied.BIS Common Best Practice Code for High-Quality Internships, July 2011, p.9

If someone is doing work, you need to pay them. Further information regarding NMW legislation can be found at Businesslink (www.businesslink.gov.uk), Directgov (www.direct.gov.uk), and the Pay and Work Rights Helpline (0800 917 2368).

More information on six principles of best practice: preparation;recruitment; induction; treatment; supervision and mentoring;and certification, reference and feedback can be found at BIS Common Best Practice Code for High-Quality Internships, July 2011

Placements and Internships:

Legal issues

• Insurance• IP• Provision of CPD• Recruitment – ‘who is the best’ or ‘for whom is it the next best step?’

Placements and Internships:

Other legal/ ethical issues

“Just under two fifths ….perceived there was strong competition for internships and that employers could therefore differentiate on grounds such as relevant work experience, despite the aim of the scheme being to provide such experience, as well as other criteria.(Review of Graduate Talent Pool Programme, Robin Mellors-Bourne, CRAC).

Government Policy & ActivityParticularly BIS

Affected by change in govt; broader economic picture

Research CouncilsAHRC & ESRC in particular, plus policy

documents from RCUK

UniversitiesIncluding UUK Vitae

Researcher Developers

What policy and how does it fit together?

Researchers!

Advisory & Representative Groups CIHE, EEUK, SSCs, HEA, UKCGE

Dearing Report 1997All higher education students should have some form of work experience

before they graduate

Lambert Review 2003work experience was universally regarded as an important way of

developing employability skills and business awareness

Higher Level Skills Strategy, DIUS 2008an individual’s employability provided the best possible foundation for their future

prosperity in a changing economy

HE Taskforce, CBI 2009 ensure all graduates have

employability skills, all businesses should provide work experience,

internship and live project opportunities for …university

students.

EFWE 2005“opportunity to build employability skills of this nature*, through work

experience schemes, was thought to be highly beneficial in finding

employment in a globalised labour market.

Innovation Nation 2008**Importance of higher-level skills to

economic development: DIUS’s Higher Level Skills Strategy. Aimed to provide framework for driving up

the higher level skills that contribute to innovation in business.

Graduate Talent Pool, DBIS OGO 2009

a national scheme to make finding applying for and starting an

internship as easy as possible

Supporting Graduate Employability: HEI practice in other

countries (CIHE 2011)Compulsory work experience?***

Vitae Response to the Smith Review, 2009

‘enabling doctoral graduates to articulate their skills and experiences

to employers is key. This should remain a priority for institutions’

Employers’ Views of Researchers’ Skills Vitae,

2007Industrial experience develops

commerical awareness . There is a value in exposing researchers to

other working environments.

Hodge Review 2011opportunities such as secondments and wider external experience are forms of training and could be exploited more

Common best practice for quality internships,

(BIS July 2011)internships provide valuable entry

routes into the professions and contribute to the development of

‘on the job’ professional skills

Experience in the workplace is an important aspect of a researcher’s employability profile and we should be trying to organise more of it.

There is a need to developing practical work-based experience for postgraduates to aid employability and mobility

Placements can be a good way of communicating the postgraduate offer to employers

Employer-identified skills gaps and ‘satisfaction gaps’ continue to emphasise hard-to-reach skills that are, arguably, best developed in ‘live’ contexts: strategic ability, leadership, commercial awareness, customer-awareness, bid-writing and fundraising

Placements can be a good first step in engagement with employers

Value of closer ties between universities and business, and the movement of skills and talent between universities and employers and back again

Key Themes

What does the AHRC think?

AHRC Delivery Plan 2011-2015

2.1.2 We will increase our expectation that postgraduate training stimulates knowledge exchange and the interaction between postgraduate research and non-academic agencies for all students

2.1.4 The AHRC will promote and further develop opportunities for postgraduate students and early career researchers to gain experience outside their core disciplines, outside HE and outside the UK

Generally - supportive of not being prescriptive about what the best way of developing skills is.

What does the ESRC think?

ESRC Strategic Plan 2009-2014

• Postgraduate Training Framework highlights Roberts’ Money as an aopportunity to extend the breadth and depth of transferrable skills provision – helping to ensure that the needs of the employer outside the academic community are addressed.

• Specifically mentions knowledge transfer, impact and entrepreneurship/ leadership

What did BBSRC find so compelling about internships that they have now built them in?

2002 SET for success- setting the scene for wider training in professional and transferrable skills

Recommended by the Bioscience Skills and Career Strategy Panel (Does AHRC have an equivalent?)

Wider professional experience for PhD students has been identified as an area of high priority for action by BBSRC

Researchers need to be mobile – internships are a way of developing skills for mobility

BIS PG Review 2010: ‘HEIs need to be more pro-active in providing postgraduates with the opportunity t develop the core competencies they need to succeed in a competitive job market. This should include opportuniites for postgraduates to undertake relevant work experience placements and internships in business, public services and the third sector’.

BBSRC PIPs

Annex 7 Professional Internships for PhD students (PIPs) from Call for Proposals BBSCR Doctoral Training Partnerships

Priorities included:

Finding ways for HEIs to engage effectively with SMEs, which increasingly will provide the majority of researcher employment opportunities.

Increasing awareness of the value and importance of cross-sector experience for knowledge exchange and innovation, particularly through placements and work experience.

CBI, Vitae, RCUK: The future of the UK research base and implications for the professional and career development of researchers, June 2011

Finding ways for HEIs to engage effectively with SMEs, which increasingly will provide the majority of researcher employment opportunities. Facilitate the development of regional collaborations between HEIs

to increase local access and engagement by SMEs, including opportunities for people exchange.

Create opportunities for HEIs to interact with large companies and SMEs through sector-specific activities, for example through existing local clusters such as the creative industries cluster in the South East.

Develop good practice guides and a library of case studies illustrating effective engagement with SMEs, for example illustrating the experiences of the Scottish pooling and business engagement models.

Increase exposure to industry and business throughout the education system, including schools, undergraduate level, as well as for researchers.

Develop a national framework for people exchange along the lines of the Lambert Agreement for collaborative research.

Provide a UK mechanism to facilitate and broker opportunities for people exchange for researchers through work experience, placements and internships.

Provide online access for HEIs and companies to advice on how to set up placements, access to reflective learning resources and examples of good practice.

Provide a platform for HEIs and companies to explore issues relating to funding and different views of the appropriate length of placements.

Make better use of alumni to strengthen HEI and company links and provide role models to researchers.

Explore ways also to encourage transfers into higher education from other sectors.

Increasing awareness of the value and importance of cross-sector experience for knowledge exchange and innovation, particularly through placements and work experience.

Challenges in setting up placements with employers– an ASH perspective

Why is it difficult to get businesses to engage with ASH (or at least AH)?

How does this impact on development of placement activity?

HE is a key employer. How can we develop ‘live briefs’ internally? PE internships? KT stuff? Traditional Research Assistantships?

It takes time – on both sides

Increasing focus on best practice takes even more time!

What are the skills needs of ‘other’?

When designing placement programmes, we need to be driven by where researchers go, and what the (future) skills needs are in these sectors (beyond the RDF?)

Which skills?

A sector toolkit- The Arts Graduate Centre’s Creative Industry Skills Toolkit

• Methodology – staff, alumni, employers, Sector Skills Councils

• Key outcomes information about what the skills gaps are in the CIs in the next five

yearsInformation about what skills researchers learned versus what they

needed/used in their jobsInformation about the value of placementsInformation about the willingness of industry partners to work with

us un a post-Hodge ‘routine and systematic’ way.

What skills did you learn? What skills did you need?

Knowledge and Intellectual Abilities

What skills did you learn? What skills did you need?

Personal Effectiveness

What skills did you learn? What skills did you need?

Engagement Influence and Impact

A sector toolkit- The Arts Graduate Centre’s Creative Industry Skills Toolkit

• key challenges that employers flagged up about why they didn’t currently engaged;

• the potential for more routine use of postgraduate placements in research projects by academics

• Barriers to this: lack of appropriate training for PGs, lack of understanding about admin and (increasingly) legal issues;

• Employers that responded identifying work experience (mirroring national trends) as a key skills gap in PGs that they appointed. This wasn’t flagged up by PGs.

• This kind of analysis is a really useful tool if you have the time to do it• Vitae lenses?

Challenges

Time – to design, to support and to ensure compliance

Money – to pay workers

On-going skills gaps: work experience, leadership, articulation of skills (plus ability to work in a team, confidence, interpersonal skills). Why do they continue to be ‘hard-to-reach’?

Is an internship (experience of work/ work experience) a way of delivering these other skills? Can it be viewed as such? Could we specifically design a placement that spoke to these hard-to-reach skills?

Might need a new approach to articulating skills via reflective practice – getting more out of less (see Internocracy – term ‘internship’ is a hold-all term and describe everything and nothing)

Sarah Kerr & Rebekah Smith McGloin – University of Nottingham

Learning lessons from experience: a trajectory of placement development

Richard Carruthers– University of SouthamptonSouthampton City Council Case Study for Humanities students.

Examples of existing placement activity

+

Peer Support Other Grad

School provisionSupervisor Support

Careers Service

Emotions

ActionReflection

ActionReflection

ActionReflection

1. FrameGoal-setting

Introduction to reflective practice

Careers context

2. ReviewGoals

3. ReframeRe-set goals

re-evaluate context

4. ImplementWriting skills section of CV

Use newly-developed skills in research

Apply for other placements/ jobs

= Evaluation Point

Internal experienceIntention to

learn Work place environment

The Arts Graduate CentreReflective Practice Model for Researcher Placements

Publishing Blog – Peer Support and Critique

• A useful tool for proving support to remotely-located placements• A productive way of providing support to group placements and encouraging them

to support one another

Swylvia– developing beyond your goals

I am writing this 5 days after the first day of my placement at Lakeside. The day was not challenging in terms of the tasks I was given but it gave me a sense of satisfaction in a different area. I was proud to find myself feeling quite confident when introduced to new people. I did feel a bit overwhelmed of course, however, I was able to contain the fear of embarrassing myself and actually enjoy being introduced to the Lakeside staff…..

I am now reading what I wrote last week and there is something I would like to add here. I went out with the Lakeside staff last night and I spoke quite a lot with Debs (marketing assistant I believe), who is unbelievably supportive. I now think that all my efforts to feel more confident within the ‘work environment’ are actually working as Debs said I come across as a very capable and positive person. I was really glad to hear that as I felt a bit insecure last night. I will try not to be so preoccupied with small things and stay positive as apparently there is no need to worry in that department. I will try and concentrate all my energy on more important things.

Swylvia– developing beyond your goals

“The first day at Lakeside also proved to be a challenge in yet another way. Since Sofia and Debs made a point of introducing me to everyone in the office, which is extremely nice of them because I felt like a part of the team since the get go. However, the opportunity to be introduced to people put me at a disadvantaged position as they immediately recognized me as ‘foreign’.”

• Reflection works for some and not for others• You get out what you put in• It is a great way for researchers to develop an awareness of their own skills set and

to start to become comfortable articulating their strenghts and weaknesses

Case study: Placements 2008-2011The Arts Graduate Centre, University of Nottingham

CIL-funded cross-Faculty internship

programme

Consultancy-level audience development

placementsLakeside portfolio

Archives and special collections, Writing East Midlands, Nottingham

Contemporary

Publishing PlacementsIntern-to-managerExchange 2009American Scene

Derbyshire County Council Derby Quad ERDF money Future – compulsory?

Reflective practice - groups scalability

Leadership and business skills

Working with the sector skills councils

Time

Workshop

• 45 minutes: Think about one of the questions suggested earlier, or think of your own. Decide what you want to get out of your discussion before you start.

• 15 minutes: Report back to room. Peer feedback.

Are you interested in working with us to progress one of these ideas?