Year in Industry

Neal Snooke

Telephone: (+44) 01970 621 782
Email: nns@aber.ac.uk

Neal is the Industrial Year Co-ordinator and is responsible for the placing and monitoring of students during their industrial year placements.
How this works and the benefits to the student and the employer are outlined below.

Industrial Year Student Placement Scheme

The industrial year placement scheme gives our computer science and software-engineering students the opportunity to gain invaluable experience in industry and the public sector. Typically, we place about 80 students each year in a variety of organisations, from large corporations such as IBM, NTL Internet and Compaq, through to two-person companies consisting only of the owner and the student. It is repeatedly demonstrated that the scheme benefits both students and employers:

The scheme complements the department's philosophy of teaching work-relevant skills, enabling students to integrate quickly within a commercial environment after they graduate.
The scheme provides students with the opportunity to acquire skills and experiences that cannot be taught or provided in an academic environment.

The scheme also enables students to earn a salary that may help finance their final year(s) at university. Although salaries vary from about Ł8,000 to Ł17,000 per annum depending on location and type of organisation, Ł10,000 is typical. Some companies will also provide financial sponsorship and many offer students permanent employment after graduation.
The university Careers Department operates a Year in Employment Scheme (YES) that provides considerable assistance to computer science and software engineering students wishing to be placed in industry.

More on the scheme

An industrial year placement is a mandatory and assessed part of the department's IEE and British Computer Society accredited BEng and MEng degree courses. It is also mandatory for students studying computer science with a European language. We also encourage our BSc students to take a year in industry. The placement occurs after the second year.
Our only requirement on a placement organisation is to provide a suitably challenging IT-related job and to treat the students like any other employee. During the placement, each student is assigned an academic supervisor who monitors progress. The student writes monthly reports and is visited once or twice by the supervisor to discuss progress. The organisation is also asked to provide a brief assessment report at the end of the placement.
Those students doing a mandatory placement are required to produce a 5000 word report describing the organisation, its technical environment, the work they undertook and a critical evaluation. This report, together with the student's performance during the placement are assessed, thereby counting towards the student's final degree.

Teaching work-relevant skills

The Computer Science Department fosters skills that we believe will be of benefit to industry. The industrial placement year is an important part of our aim to make our graduates employable. The industrial year enables our students to put into practice skills acquired during their first two years at university. These skills include:

The ability to apply software engineering techniques, including object-oriented analysis and design and programming using Java and C;
The ability to judge what constitutes a good user interface;
A knowledge of network communications;
The ability to develop databases and database applications;
A knowledge of artificial intelligence techniques and their application;
An exposure to the UNIX and Windows environments and an introduction to UNIX systems programming, as well as being taught the general principles of operating systems and concurrency;
A knowledge of hardware and the development of small real-time systems.

Second year students undertake a group project. Small teams are given the task to design, implement and test a substantial software application. An example is the development of an automated stock broker system that must interact with an existing automated stock transaction system to buy and sell shares. Each team is formally structured with a team leader, designers, quality assurance manager, and testers with strict adherence to quality assurance procedures.
Industrial placement organisations have often commented on how well our students integrate within commercial teams, and we attribute this to activities such as the group project and the Outward Bound team-building weekends. Students derive a huge amount of experience working in industry. This is because students:

help develop real systems;
work in real projects with real commercial deadlines;
are often required to liaise with authentic customers;
are often exposed to a variety of hardware platforms, operating systems and development tools.

This verity of technical and organisational environments is difficult or impossible to re-create within academia.
Students often find that the experience gained during their placement helps them with their studies and coursework when they return to the department. Occasionally work undertaken in industry provides inspiration when undertaking their final year project.
You can see examples of our Year In Industry here.

Chris Loftus
January 25, 2000

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If you have any difficulties with the above, or have any suggestions to make on how things can be improved, please do not hesitate to email me.

John Woodbury

Last modified: Sep 5 2001