Fostering student employability is a high priority at the School of Psychology.

As part of our overall employability strategy, we recognise that providing placements and opportunities for work-based learning is crucial to student employability outcomes and we currently do this through our #PsychologyAtWork programme which is open to all students.

Skills workshops, Alumni mentoring, Careers events and Workplace visits are just some examples of the programme of events we are running this year.

We have 4 placements programme across our undergraduate and postgraduate taught courses

• An undergraduate 1 year paid placement
• An undergraduate unpaid 3^rd year module lasting 15-20 days between Sep-Dec of the academic year
• An optional unpaid placement module for our Masters in Applied Developmental Psychology lasting 10-20 days between Jan- April of the academic year
• An optional unpaid placement module for our Masters in Clinical Health Psychology lasting 10-20 days between Jan- April of the academic year.

In previous years we have had about 60 students out on placement, however with the increase in student appetite for 1-year placements and the 2 new PGT placement modules, we will have a total of 122 students out supporting the work of organisations across the Statutory, Public, Private and Charity/ Voluntary sectors.

The roles vary from HR assistants to Statistics and data analysts to support workers to classrooms assistants. They are interested a range of fields and their psychological experience and knowledge means they can work in varied roles.

Opportunities for Alumni involvement in our #PsychologyAtWork programme:

• We will be running Placement Action Week from 23-27 January 2023 and would love to hear from you if you can spare an hour to run an information sessions or activity such as showcasing your job role, organisation or sector, working with student to help them apply for roles or doing interview preparation and mock interviews? Any other ideas welcome!
• If your organisation hosts 1-year placements students currently looking for roles starting June-Sep 2023) or has any temporary 1-year roles, please let us know and we can advertise these on our Jobs board.
• If you have a smaller project, you would like done, but just haven’t had the time, please get in touch and we can help formulate it into something our students could complete as part of their optional placement module.
• We would love to visit you, if you have space for students to attend the organisation for a half/ full day to hear from the different roles that make it tick and to give them a real-world experience of a working environment.

If you would like to chat through any of this (with no strings attached) please contact our #PsychologyAtWork Team - Patricia Murphy (patricia.murphy@qub.ac.uk) or Elaine Lavery (e.lavery@qub.ac.uk).

Work Placements with Psychology