BA (Hons) Business and Enterprise Management graduate Rebecca Malkin took a year-long placement at Johnson & Johnson working as a business operations and legal compliance associate. The skills she learnt during her placement helped her to secure a graduate trainee role with manufacturing company Gripple.
 
Alongside her studies, Rebecca was president of the enterprise society, course rep, and started her own business with the support of the Hallam i-Lab service which led to her winning the most inspirational student award for entrepreneurship.

“I successfully applied for my placement after receiving a lot of help with my CV from the careers team at Sheffield Hallam. They helped me specialise my CV to the job I was applying for. This really helped — I had a lot of experience that I could reflect on, but I wasn't sure how to condense it into a CV format to show employers the best side of myself.

“On my placement every day was different. I undertook lots of duties, including testing a new business compliance system, building a new SharePoint, working on contracts and presenting to management.

“I really benefited from the day-to-day office activities that you get from going on a placement. I got to meet a lot of people and from day one I was given a lot of responsibility to look after certain projects.

“I think it's really useful for anyone to go on a placement year. It gives you real-world insight so when you come back to uni for your final year you understand the work better. My placement helped me get a better grade in my final year and it also enabled me to get a really good graduate position because I already had real-life experience.

“After my course I was offered a graduate role with Johnson & Johnson, and that's purely through the connections from my placement year. I didn’t take it as I wanted to stay in Sheffield, but my placement also helped me gain my current job. I was able to talk confidently in the interview, and in my first week I was put in charge of a major project because of the software that I'd used in my placement year.”