Placement Student Review

I very much enjoyed my work placement with Caterpillar. Within my placement I touched on so many aspects of engineering from my learning at university. Once I had been fully setup on their IT systems there wasn't a dull day. The responsibilities I had been given made me feel like part of the team not just a placement.

I really felt part of the team. Being involved in these schemes before I was pleasantly surprised with how much you are trusted to just get on with the work on hand. There isn't a feeling that because you are a placement you can't do what any of the experienced engineers can do.

I am studying a mechanical degree at university while my role also involved a lot of electrical engineering knowledge. Due to this gap in my education my manager did provide support to ensure I full understood components and systems. There was complete understanding and support given. It is understood that being a placement means you are here to learn as well as work.

I believe the work load given was fair. There is always something to be done. A lot of tools were given to you to ensure that you could organised your work load. Although there was a lot of work to do you never felt like you were drowning and there was always time to leave your desk and grab a coffee.

The responsibility and trust given to placements was unbelievable. Caterpillar really do expect and trust yo to just get on with the work required. They will happily offer support if you ask but it is down to you to organised and complete the work. Personally I enjoyed the feeling that Caterpillar trusted me to get the job done.

Organisation is a big skill I have learned here at Caterpillar. As a classic student I would just complete work as required last minute. At the start of my placement this caused me to make a few mistakes and so I quickly learned how to organised myself and work. I will defiantly be carrying this learning forward with me in my studies.

The atmosphere was not a stressful one. You generally felt like you could ask for support in any area required. Yes there were busy times but people were always willing to organised a time for you to come back. There is also a lot of graduates around who have gone through the placement scheme and they are really helpful.

Although I really enjoyed the work side of the placement the social side struggled a bit. I believe for the placement students there were only 3/4 events organised throughout the whole year. There were formal update forums organised every month for the first few months but them they stopped. The forums created a good environment to share placement and graduate feedback so it was unfortunate that they stopped.

Caterpillar is a fantastic company to develop yourself as a professional engineer. They support the IMECHE and engineers becoming chartered. They also actively support STEM activities and allow engineers time off work to support these activities as long as they don't fall behind on work. As a placement student money was spent on me to provide software and tools so I could learn to use them which I can take with me and use in the future.

The future employment prospects seem to be good. Caterpillar offer graduate places to previous placement students. As far as I'm aware the placement students get offered graduate places before they are advertised externally. This gives placements students first chance of securing a graduate place and job for after they finish their degree.

There was only 3/4 placement student social events held over the year and so could have been improved. This seemed to be due to poor organisation of the social events team. There seems to be one volunteer who then became to busy with work to arrange events. So I guess more support in that area would be recommend.