As you may know, placements are very common to do as a University of Bath student - with most undergraduate courses here offering a placement year. I am on a four-year Business course where I have two 6-month placements. My first one was in the first semester of the second year and my next one will be in the second semester of the third year.
I did my placement back home in Barcelona, and I will delve into the process I incurred whilst finding a placement abroad, as well as some top tips. To start off, the placement team is incredibly helpful and it’s a great idea to let them know your location preferences. However, they will naturally offer more placements based in the UK, particularly in London. This is natural as there are more job opportunities there and the University has more connections within the country.
For this reason, you must not only be counting on the University to find a placement but must also do your own research. LinkedIn is the primary source of vacancies, and you must use it to your advantage!
Keynote: placements abroad normally advertise their vacancies very late, i.e. they set up the vacancy just 1-2 months before they will ask you to start!
This is the way I browsed for placements on LinkedIn:
1. Note that international companies refer to placements as internships. It is important to know the correct terminology!
2. Search for the name of the role you are interested in – remember to keep this broad at first to increase the range of jobs you find. For example, the term ‘marketing’ is not as limited as ‘social media'.
3. Change the location to whichever city/country you are looking for.
4. Filter ‘Job Type’ to ‘Internship’
After filtering your job preferences, you can set up alerts to receive emails every time there is a new job according to your filters.
On LinkedIn there is a feature to ‘Easy Apply’ – this means you apply through LinkedIn itself and normally only need to attach your CV!
With companies in Spain particularly, I noticed they will call you at a random time to do a phone call interview, so stay alert! I remember being woken up twice (at 11am whoops!) by companies asking to interview me over the phone, with no warning whatsoever. I had to quickly search up the company calling me because I was applying to so many that I couldn’t remember which was which.
I got my placement at a company in Barcelona as a social media and operations intern. My experience was very smooth:
• Application with CV and cover letter
• Exercise to complete (social media work)
• Phone call interview with HR Manager
• Video call interview with Manager
I then secured the job! My advice would be to be yourself throughout the whole process. You want a company to like you for who you are, especially since you’ll be working with them for the next 6-12 months!
I hope this helps and please feel free to comment down below if you have any questions whatsoever about finding a placement abroad, particularly in Spain 😊
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