Civil Service Organisations: T Level Industry Placement Journey - Expansion
Make placement opportunities available to as many students as possible
Outcome
Placement opportunities are identified throughout the organisation in all available locations and offered to students from a variety of backgrounds who are studying a wide range of T Level courses
Key steps
Move over a box to see what’s involved and click to go to the step you’re interested in.
| 1 - Ambitions | Restate the organisation’s ambition for young people’s futures and strengthen its commitment to T Levels |
| 2 - Opportunities | Recalibrate the scale of opportunities offered to T Level students through industry placements |
| 3 - Challenges and Solutions | Learn the lessons from experience and make positive changes to enhance the quality of the industry placement programme even further |
Ambitions
Many employers who start their T Level and industry placement journey with one or two students discover the scope and appetite to host more, in a whole variety of roles and areas of the organisation. Some have ambitious plans to expand the number of placements they offer. They want the benefits of scale and have developed the internal processes to support a significant expansion.
The Civil Service is no different. As a group of organisations employing over 400,000 people in England, there is significant scope to expand the number of placements and offer early career opportunities to a much greater number of young people.
The scope to expand student numbers significantly still exists even when the overall number of Civil Service employees is static or reducing. This is because growth in certain areas such as digital, data and technology, analytics, and operational delivery professions continues to fuel demand for people with these skills.
Organisations that successfully deliver placements at scale:
- Integrate their industry placement programme as part of wider workforce planning
- Look for placement opportunities across the whole range of careers in the organisation
- Offer placements on multiple sites
- Provide a central support function to departments and teams
- Standardise processes
Making good use of flexible delivery approaches they also:
- Split placements between sites
- Rotate students around different teams and specialisms
- Offer placements jointly with other organisations in their supply chains and networks
Having effective working relationships with providers is even more critical with large numbers of students. This usually means working with multiple providers in different parts of the country. Providers approach industry placements in different ways so it isn’t always possible to replicate a single approach across the country. However, employers offering larger numbers usually have a great deal of say in how they are delivered.
Embedding young people in the culture
“ We have ambitious plans to scale up the number of students studying T Levels, and as the Civil Service it is important that we lead the way in driving up the number of industry placements being delivered in the public sector. Here in the Department for Education we have secured over 80 industry placements for T Level students this year and have an ambition to reach 100.”
Susan Acland-Hood, Permanent Secretary, Department for Education
The DfE’s target for 100 T Level placements a year reflects an ambition to reach steady state, with a stream of students coming in and being almost a part of the furniture.
Hosting a placement won’t feel like a new concept anymore. Having students around and involved in teams will just be part of the day-to-day work of the department, with the ‘student voice’ adding something valuable and new to the diverse character of the organisation.
But the ambition goes deeper than a numerical target, important though it is for the department to open its doors to young people with a wide variety of backgrounds and aspirations. In a way, the most important thing about the DfE’s long-term approach to industry placements is the intent that students will be fully embedded in the organisation’s structures, workflows and culture.
As well as working in a team and being supported by an individual line manager and mentor, students will also belong to a division or a directorate. They will be part of the wider organisation, with the chance to experience work in different teams, see how their activities interconnect, take part in the broader life of the organisation, and absorb the values and ethos of the Civil Service for themselves.
Further resources
Lloyd's Banking Group Case Study
Opportunities
Identifying opportunities and openings for placements across the whole organisation is key to expanding placement numbers.
Opportunities to expand may come from:
- Within departments and teams already hosting students – how many more can they offer?
- In departments and teams not currently hosting students – why should they start and what would make it easier for them to do so?
- By extending the range of T Level subjects available and looking at all roles, including non-core and support occupations
Further resources
Challenges and solutions
The main challenges to a successful expansion of placement numbers are:
- Sustainability – getting the conditions right for an industry placement programme to grow and sustain itself at scale over time
- Replicability – applying a standardised methodology that allows local flexibility and encourages innovation
- Integration – joining up with other early career and talent initiatives and wider workforce development plans, and with everyday work practices
- Progression – providing carer pathways within the organisation and beyond
The table below suggests solutions to these challenges.
| Challenge | Solutions |
| Sustainability |
Create a clear strategic rationale for industry placements that is consistent with the organisation’s mission and embodies its values Maintain the commitment of senior leaders in support of the strategy Demonstrate how the industry placement programme supports business and HR objectives for recruitment, talent and early careers Provide evidence of its contribution to the organisation’s equality diversity and inclusion goals Show how giving opportunities to young people helps to support a shared set of values around people and a developmental culture within teams Learn from and build on successes and setbacks |
| Replicability |
Create and resource a central function for high-level planning, systems development, data analysis, and support Create a two-way flow of information, insight and intelligence between the central function and departments/teams Standardise delivery models and processes Simplify reporting documents and data collection Encourage local innovation and share good practice |
| Integration |
Position T Levels and industry placements within workforce development plans, talent strategies and early career initiatives Show how students contribute to their teams by supplying skills, new perspectives and fresh ideas, and extra help with work and projects Show the positive impact of hosting students on managers, mentors and other staff involved Encourage conversations about the value to communities and society of opening the organisation’s doors to a more diverse range of young people |
| Progression |
Create clear progression pathways for students into occupations and jobs within the organisation Build momentum for progression into these jobs by evidencing a track record of successful recruitment and lower attrition Use IfATE’s occupational maps to identify the range of occupations linked to T Level subjects Show how students can progress through Civil Service grades, Fast Stream and other accelerated programmes Alert students to apprenticeship and job vacancies and other opportunities such as internships Help students to produce professional job applications and prepare for interviews and assessment centres |
What next?
In the next phase after the initial pilot, the DWP’s Digital Academy aims to expand its industry placement programme to more hubs in different parts of the country. This involves:
- Identifying business areas interested in hosting as student
- Finding out about the roles that placements could be matched to
- Targeting specific T Level courses
- Identifying providers that deliver these courses in the area.
Jodie McDermott, Digital Talent Partner, outlines some of the challenges they face in going geographically wide:
“It’s quite tricky to look at the bigger picture and figure out what it’s going to look like. Every business area works in a completely different way and each one would probably have a different preference for how the placement is organised.
“And then obviously you've got all of the different providers that also have different preferences for how they manage their schemes. So it's making sure that we can then match the business area with the provider in terms of course, role, location and placement model.
“We kept it quite small initially in the pilot and we’ve been able to agree the model each time on an individual basis. And I’m hoping we can use this experience when we scale up, by giving them some preset options. It seems that the two days a week or two-week blocks options are the ones most likely to work.”
Further resources
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