Summer placement student Review

I did a 6 week placement at JNB at their Rolls-Royce framework in Derby. It was interesting to see and work on several different sites and do a bit of design work. The staff were friendly and helpful. There were a few issues with IT which meant I couldn't do anything myself for the first week.

The staff were really nice but working on site everyone is busy doing their jobs so it is quite hard to ask for things to do when you aren't trained. So sometimes you felt a bit like a burden as there wasn't that much we could actually do. But when people had the time, they were really useful in helping our understanding of the construction process.

As everyone was really busy on site there was not much support given, but if you needed support you would have been able to easily get it. Everything was pretty chilled for the summer placements so we could easily move around or do different work that we were more interested in.

I had a couple of tasks to do each day, they were mainly simple tasks that didn't require much help. When we had a concrete pour, me and the other summer placement on site did the concrete cubes for testing which was a good practical experience. I also had to do a few driving jobs in my car to help out.

As we didn't get any training and it was not worth training us for such a short period of time, it meant that we didn't have that much responsibility. But the jobs we were given were quite rewarding and the whole experience of being on site helped with my learning.

It was useful to see how a proper site works day to day, when you don't really understand the process of how a site works just from lectures at university. The best skill I learnt was how to make good concrete cubes and doing some levelling and setting out with the site engineer.

The main office in Derby was quite quiet when I was there as people are always out and about on sites. The sites I worked on had good atmospheres and good relationships between the engineering team and workers on site. Everyone was very friendly and welcoming to the summer placements.

Organisation was quite poor, as the summer placements were organised quite quickly it meant there wasn't much communication between head office and the places we were being sent to around the country. I was placed with an apprentice in the office at Derby who then got moved to a site in Coventry which was a very long drive for me, so I had to ask to move to another site.

As said before, we were not given any practical training to use on site, but you learnt from the people working on site watching them do their job. If the placement was longer then some training would have been useful to be able to help out more on site and be more independent.

I am interested in keeping in contact with JN Bentley to possibly get another placement next summer, maybe based more in design instead of working on site all the time. I would be interested in working in a different framework of the company to see how different parts of the company work.

JN Bentley hired several summer placement students from the University of Leeds after a construction field course we did with them. This meant that several of the summer placements already knew each other so it was nice to work on sites with some familiar faces and it was reassuring to see the kind of work that they were also doing.

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