Hi I’m Tom Liggins and I’ve just finished my third and final year in the Liberal Arts Department at the University of Warwick. In this video, I’m going to talk to you about work placements and work placement options that you have while at your time at Warwick in the Liberal Arts Department.

Firstly, I should say the School for Cross-faculty Studies at Warwick - which includes the Liberal Arts Department and Global Sustainable Development (GSD) - has its own Employability and Placement Manager called Bodrun, and she’s fantastic. She works full time finding us placements and work opportunities to take either during your time at Warwick or career opportunities after your time at Warwick.

Your two options, while you’re at university [Warwick], are either to take your third year out to do a sandwich course, so a year in industry, which would add an extra year on to your course. That’s not what I did – I stuck with the three-year course and instead I took the Certificate of Professional Communication which is one of three certificates you can take during your time at Warwick [as a Liberal Arts student]. With the Certificate of Professional Communication, you do a week of seminars with Bodrun and outside speakers, talking about how best to function in the workplace environment. You also have to take a summer placement.

I did my placement in the summer after second year, so last summer, and I did it with a company called Innovation Alliance for the West Midlands. This was one of many placements that Bodrun had found and was on offer just to our Department and I did it with three other students from the GSD Department. For Innovation Alliance for the West Midlands, we basically worked four weeks helping them with their marketing and also we ran their flagship event of the year, which was an innovation event in Birmingham at the National Exhibition Centre (NEC).

Essentially what Innovation Alliance does is it brokers the gap between big business, big investors, and innovators (so start-ups or students who have fantastic business ideas that they want to launch but they don’t quite have the finances to do so). For example, their big flagship event in the NEC was to do just that - it was filled with start-ups, innovators, and also people representing big businesses. There were loads of seminars, opportunities for people to meet-and-greet, and we helped run it. It was a fantastic experience to see the inside of a large business and to see networking happening before your eyes. It was a fantastic experience and one I wouldn’t have got without the Liberal Arts Department.

I hope that was helpful. There are lots of options essentially for you to at the University to get work placements. Thanks!