Government funded body e-Placement Scotland is calling for employers and students to get behind a new initiative: ‘Let’s Get Paid’. The initiative aims to promote the importance of offering paid work experience for computing and IT students in Scotland.
The announcement comes as e-Placement Scotland reports on a successful first 12 months which has seen over 1000 students register on its database with 191 three month equivalent posts created so far.
Feedback from students who have completed placements indicates that many of them have subsequently been offered full time posts on qualifying.
e-Placement Scotland helps students at Scottish universities and colleges find paid IT work placements.
Recruiting right through the year and with placements from three to 12 months, opportunities range from software and mobile app development to telecoms and digital technologies for a variety of industries.
At a time when the technology sector is facing a skills shortage and with numbers of applications to computing-related higher education in Scotland falling by 33% since 2006, e-Placement Scotland provides a critical link between academia and business. Worth £4bn to the Scottish economy and employing 100,000 people, the ICT sector needs more than 40,000 new entrants to fill software, IT and telecom roles in Scotland over the next five years. Employment in the IT industry is predicted to grow nearly nine times faster than the Scottish average.
Sally Smith e-Placement Scotland’s Project Director and Head of the School of Computing at Edinburgh Napier University says: “With record unemployment and a growing skills shortage, our message is that the IT sector is buoyant and it is hiring. We believe schemes like this are critical for employers to find and nurture talent as well as for students to improve their employability and gain confidence. The call to action ‘let’s get paid’ will run across all our social media channels and throughout our communications over the next 12 months and will hopefully be a rallying cry to students and employers.”
Taking part in a paid student work placement is a guaranteed way of earning money while putting skills into practice within the industry, improving employability and maybe even getting a better degree result as Smith continues: “We are delighted with the results of the last year. This has shown that there is an appetite for paid work experience from both employers and students. Recent publicity surrounding unpaid work experience has shown how important it is to create meaningful paid work placements so both sides have a good experience.”
Since its launch in December 2010, e-Placement Scotland has seen the greatest take up from the SME sector. Smaller companies don’t have time or resources to take part in the traditional recruitment ‘milk round’ so paid placements are a valuable way for companies to tap into the dynamic talent pool at universities and colleges.
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