Student placements – voice from the industry

Students can be a rich resource with niche, fresh knowledge and skills to bring to your organisation. Student placements can be beneficial for businesses in myriad ways, especially for specific projects or activities that can be completed in a relatively short duration.

We heard from Bhavita Patel, Business Development Manager for Healthy Living at the Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC) about the benefits she’s experienced from recruiting from the student pool.

What kind of benefit do you think hosts can get from taking on a student for a placement?

Having been a manager to several placement students myself, I genuinely believe there is huge value for host organisations. Taking on a placement student is incredibly rewarding,  not just from a development perspective, but for the team and organisation as a whole.

Students bring fresh thinking, new ideas, and a different perspective. They often question why things are done a certain way, which can be a really healthy challenge for established teams. They also bring the latest academic thinking and approaches, which can complement industry experience very well.

From a business point of view, placements are also a great way to build future talent. I’ve seen students grow in confidence and capability over the course of their placement, becoming increasingly autonomous and taking real ownership of their work. In some cases, that has led directly to them being offered a role once they finished their degree, which is a fantastic outcome for both the student and the organisation.

There’s also real value in imparting knowledge. Explaining concepts, sharing experience, and supporting someone early in their career encourages managers and teams to reflect on their own practice. It can be energising and helps create a culture of learning within the organisation.

Overall, placements aren’t just about giving students experience, they bring tangible benefits to hosts, from fresh ideas and future talent pipelines to more engaged and reflective teams.

In agri-tech specifically, what kind of skills might we benefit from?

In many ways, agri‑tech isn’t that different from any other subsector. What is different, though, is how much listening and understanding is involved. There’s still a lot of ambiguity, regulations and standards are still evolving, the market isn’t particularly well developed, and the sector is growing quickly. You don’t always have clear answers, so you have to be comfortable sitting with that and making sure you’re doing the right things for the right reasons and sometimes taking learnings from other industry sectors that can be applied in this space.

A big part of the role is understanding problems from multiple angles. For example, a technology company and a farmer might be trying to solve the same issue, but they’ll experience very different challenges. Being able to listen properly, understand those differences, and bring people together is really important.

Communication is also key. You often need to explain quite complex technology to a wide audience, all with different levels of technical understanding. And just as importantly, you need to be confident saying, “I don’t know.” If you pretend to know something you don’t, you very quickly lose trust, and trust really matters in agri‑tech.

Finally, there’s a real need for people who can take quite messy, complex problems and distil them down into something clearer and more manageable. Turning ambiguity into something practical is a skill that adds a lot of value in this space.

You don’t need to come from an agricultural background, what really matters is a willingness to make change, improve the agri‑tech ecosystem, and approach that change in a way that respects the realities and complexities of agriculture.

There are various forms of financial support for organisations in offering student placements – find out more about funded mechanisms on our People for Projects page.