Bring it On: embarking on a Management industrial placement

Hey everyone, I’m Katy, and I’m an Accounting, Business Finance and Management (but we all call it ABFM) student. I’ve just finished my second year and I’m about to start my industrial placement with a company called Audit Partnership Ltd, which is based just outside York in a town called Tockwith.

What’s an industrial placement?

An industrial placement is where you spend a year working in a company to gain experience in a field related to what you think you might want to do as a career.

Why am I doing an industrial placement?

My placement is in Profit Recovery Auditing. I’ll go through accounts and look for places where companies have been overcharged for a product, so pretty interesting stuff! This will help me see if this really is the type of career I want to pursue after graduation or if I want to do something different. So doing a placement is definitely going to be useful.

Even if I decide this isn’t what I want to do with my life, the placement will still have been great. I’ll have learnt so many skills that I’ll be able to apply to whatever career I choose. I’m excited to see where I’ll be and what decisions I’ll be making in a years time.

But whilst I’m excited, I’m also feeling nervous and scared

This is something completely new to me and I’m not the best at adapting to new situations! I’m also moving to a new city and living with people I don’t know. I’m leaving everything that’s familiar which makes me really nervous and as my start date gets closer, the nerves are getting more and more intense.

Bring it on!

Yet at the same time, I’m feeling more ready to get going. The build-up and the wait have a habit of making things seem so much scarier than they really are. And whilst I’m leaving what’s familiar, I’m not alone in this.

All my closest friends from my course are doing placements and my housemates are all doing the same placement as I am. Plus I have a strong network of people who’ll be able to support me when I need it most.

So yeah, I’m scared, and I can’t and I won’t pretend that I’m not. But I’m also eager to see what the next year has in store for me. So all I can really say is ‘Bring it On!’

• Read Katy’s next blog post: My experience on placement so far…