Placements in the Law School

There are many benefits to undertaking work experience as a core part of your degree, including:

• To get a flavour of a professional working environment.
• To road-test a career option - within or outside of the legal sector.
• To try out different areas of Law.
• To apply legal skills and knowledge to other sectors, e.g. as part of an in-house legal team or in a business setting.
• To be a ‘safe bet’ in the eyes of employers when you compete for graduate roles.
• To apply knowledge gained from your degree to real-life work situations, e.g. research skills, advocacy, analytical skills etc.
• To develop skills you might not gain purely from a degree programme.
• To develop key personal skills, such as networking and verbal communication.

There are four ways in which the University supports students in pursuing work placement opportunities:

WORKSHOPS

The LLB Law with Professional Placement programme includes a series of non-credit-bearing workshops that helps you to develop crucial application skills. These workshops are interactive and aim to cover all aspects of placement applications, including the initial search, CV writing, application forms, assessment centres and interviews.

A key objective for these workshops is to not only support you in the fundamentals of placement applications but also to help build your interpersonal confidence. One way this is achieved in the workshops is by including a range of innovative, active exercises to give you the opportunity to practise your employability skills whilst you learn about them.

These workshops are only available to students registered to the Professional Placement programme, so if you want to benefit from this practical support, then we encourage you to transfer onto the four-year LLB Law variant.

EMPLOYER ENGAGEMENT

As part of this workshop series, there are opportunities to meet supportive placement employers in advance of their recruitment windows.

Organisations are invited into our workshops to talk with students about their placement opportunities and can offer direct advice on what they are looking for from a candidate.

Employers may also offer bespoke CV advice or interview practice as part of these sessions. In this way, you have a valuable chance to get feedback from professionals working in international-facing law firms and in-house legal teams, which can give you a strong understanding of the expectations of graduate-level recruiters.

There are also opportunities to engage with employers at the University of Exeter Law Careers Fair, several of which have benefitted from hosting our Law placement students.

1:1 APPOINTMENTS

In addition to these workshops, you will also have access to one-to-one appointments with an Employability and Placements Adviser.

In these appointments you can benefit from a direct CV review, advice on application forms, interview question practice or a range of other bespoke support. You can also use these appointments to find out more about the programme.

If you are a current student, these appointments are available during term-time and throughout the vacation periods (including the summer.) You can book a 1:1 by following these instructions:

• Login to Handshake using your student details and click on ‘Career Centre’ (top right-hand corner of screen)
• Click on the ‘Appointments’ tab and then ‘Schedule a New Appointment’
• Select the ‘Work Placements’ category
• Select appointment type Work Placement Appointment – EDU, EFPM, LAW, SSI2001, SSI3017, SSIM and you can click through to select an available date/time.

RESOURCES

As an Exeter student, you will have access to a comprehensive range of digital resources to help you in your placement search, including MyCareerZoneDigital, Handshake and Forage. You will also have the opportunity to engage with a range of bespoke Employability Schemes such as The Exeter Award, Create Your Future, the Career Mentor Scheme and Ask an Alum.

Over the past few years, students in the Law School have sourced and secured year-long placements in traditional law firms, in-house legal teams, and in adjacent sectors such as Human Resources and marketing. To date, the University has worked with over 30 organisations to deliver outstanding work experience opportunities for our students.

Placement opportunities are typically identified through advertisements on external websites (such as RateMyPlacement or Bright Network) or increasingly through employers’ direct engagement with the Law School, for example as part of the Placement Programme’s workshop series or at the Law Fair.

CREATING YOUR OWN OPPORTUNITIES

Whilst these advertised positions offer fantastic, high-level professional development, bear in mind that these are not exhaustive of the options out there.

Through the non-credit-bearing workshops in your first and second year, the Programme team aim to empower you to identify your own opportunities in line with your aspirations.

You will also be encouraged to engage in networking activities and speculative applications to unlock the “hidden job market”.

There is also the possibility to pursue opportunities abroad, and the Programme has previously supported students undertaking work placements in France, Italy and Hong Kong. If you are interested in working abroad, we encourage you to refer to the Work Abroad SharePoint and get in touch with HASS-placements@exeter.ac.uk.