Internships and professional placements
Doing an internship or professional placement can have positive impact on a researcher’s career.
- Why do an internship or professional placement?
- What are the benefits to employers of doing an internship or professional placement?
- What are the benefits to institutions of doing an internship or professional placement?
- What are the benefits to researchers of doing an internship or professional placement?
Is an internship or professional placement right for me?
Internships and professional placements can provide an opportunity to gain valuable skills and experience – for both the researcher and the organisation overseeing them.
Read our guide below, aimed at employers, institutions, and researchers.
Why do an internship or professional placement?
Internships and professional placements have great benefits for all those involved. They are suitable for researchers at all career stages, on an academic track, or for those exploring opportunities outside of academia.
Some quick facts:
- Research-active institutions can work with commercially driven, not-for-profit or public-funded organisations on one-off placements or to set up ongoing schemes.
- This approach can bring research and innovation to organisations without current capacity and can enable universities to engage more deeply with non-HE employers.
- These placements offer researchers invaluable skills for their career and professional development, helping them to assess their options and broaden their outlook.
What are the benefits for employers?
Engaging with researchers via an internship or placement opportunity can support your organisation’s research and innovation capacity, through specific projects and ongoing relationships with a university’s research team.
Other benefits:
- Develop solutions – contribute to the prosperity of your business by adding value through new approaches to projects
- Innovate – introduce new, talented individuals who bring a fresh perspective, different insights and opinions and who are highly motivated
- Knowledge transfer – gain indirect access to the considerable research knowledge and resources of a university
- Recruit new talent – assess the skills, talents and potential of individuals from within your company
- Increase your visibility – strengthen links with a university to increase your organisation’s profile and make it more attractive to new talent.
What are the benefits for institutions?
There are many benefits for institutions to place their researchers into internship and placement schemes. These schemes can help to meet an institutions’ goals for employer engagement. They also support your professional development programme for postgraduate and staff researchers.
Other benefits:
- Bridge the gap – increase your understanding of the skills that employers are looking for
- Build networks – foster and improve working relationships between academic and non-academic organisations. Connect individuals, teams and organisations
- Promote researchers’ skills – offer a positive contribution to employers in areas including product or process innovation, public engagement or policy development
- Promote collaboration – provide employers with positive experiences of working with professional researchers
- Demonstrate impact – widen the visibility and impact of your institution’s research programmes. Enable researchers to experience impact in its widest sense
- Add value to the research community -facilitate professional development opportunities that broaden perspectives and develop academic researchers’ flexibility and business-facing skills
- Support researcher careers – enable early career researchers to acquire transferable skills they are unlikely to develop in the university environment and to broaden their knowledge and career horizons
- Boost employability – maximise the potential of individual researchers by increasing awareness of workplace requirements, boosting aspirations and developing job-readiness.
What are the benefits for researchers?
Internships and professional placements can be beneficial to researchers at all career stages, and those pursuing academic and non-academic careers.
Other benefits:
- A fresh perspective – bridge the knowledge gap between university research and the needs of business, industry, government and the not-for-profit sector
- Self-awareness – build awareness of your personal preferences, self-confidence and self-esteem through experiential learning
- Professional skills – develop complementary professional experience, knowledge and skills in a client focused or other non-HE environment
- Commercial awareness – experience how business priorities impact every aspect of an organisation and how the market affects business decisions
- Teamwork skills – work in a multi-disciplinary/functional team
- Apply research skills – learn to problem-solve within a commercially driven timeframe
- Share your approach – demonstrate the relevance of research to a wider audience
- Build a network – develop new relationships to support your future career development
- Broaden your horizons -develop your knowledge of available opportunities and options for future career directions.
Final takeaways
- Internships and professional placements have great benefits for all those involved. They are suitable for researchers at all career stages, on an academic track, or for those exploring opportunities outside of academia.
- Research-active institutions can work with commercially driven, not-for-profit or public-funded organisations on one-off placements or to set up ongoing schemes.