Industrial Placement Review

I enjoyed my placement with Laing O'Rourke. While it was a bit slow to start, as all placements can be, by the time I was finished I was been given challenging and interesting pieces of work that increased my knowledge of construction on site rather than what is taught at university.

I felt like I was highly valued by my colleagues. Work that I was given was important within the project and I was helped with every question I had.

Every query or question I had was answered. If I felt like I wasn't doing enough in a certain area all I had to do was talk to my manager and they would sort it out. I was also given excellent support for my dissertation project as it was in an area that I wasn't working in but they still supported me with the correct people to find and speak to about it,

On a day to day basis this varied a lot, some days I would be in meetings all day and would struggle to complete work that day while while days were slow and I had to ask for more work. As it was an office placement it wasn't as busy as a site placement would be however there was still enough to be done so I wasn't bored.

I was put in a liaison position between a couple of subcontractors and was responsible for putting together some documents for the initial work on site. I had a lot of responsibility as I was the only person in the site team visiting the enabling works site to catch up on the subcontractor work.

Working with tunnelling, piling, reinforced concrete and more solidified my learning from my degree course I will understand it better at University as I have experienced it both in design and construction at various stages of placements.

As it was an open plan office with teams laid out according to floor the atmosphere was good and friendly. If you had a question it was easy to find and approach the right person as it was open plan. Conversation was interesting and it was a generally nice office to work in.

It took a while for the site I was working on to be confirmed. I turned up on the first day not knowing what site within the large project I was working for. But once the placement was up and running it was well organised and I didn't have any problems.

I was trained within the company and within the placement with digital engineering training being offered and development training offered within the company on set days. Both sets of training were useful, especially the digital engineering training as the same software is used on most projects. They also put a training scheme in place for placement students with webinar presentations each week about important and interesting aspects of the business.

Laing O'Rourke offer a graduate scheme that if you are successful gets offered automatically after the summer placement. This is a three year program that integrates you into the company and provides excellent support to get chartered. If you get a placement with them and do more than one placement this is a likely situation.

While there were other placement students on the project they were attached to other sites so I didn't see much of them. However the social scene was good with colleagues we would go for a drink at least once a week after work and everyone was nice. Laing O'Rourke put on placement days where you meet all the other students doing placements and this was a good opportunity to meet your fellow students.

I was working in London so everything was expensive however the nearby bar was reasonably priced.

The project I worked on did a lot of work with local charities however as I was only there for 10 weeks over summer there was no opportunity during that time. However if was there for longer there would be plenty of opportunities for me to get involved. As it was London there was plenty of stuff outside work to get involved in.