Internships are an opportunity for a student to work within your organisation for a short period of time but long enough to give them a sense of what it is like to work within that role. Whether you are a small or large organisation, our students can be invaluable for their knowledge and fresh thinking ideas. Hear from one of our current internship students Darren Mercer, who is spending time with the sales and marketing company Xsell-Team:
What attracted you to apply for a placement position within this company? I hadn't heard of the company before, I had only heard of it through the Employability student portal. It looked like the role would suit me, as well as this I was out of uni, out of work and determined to get experience.
What sort of work have you been doing for the company? The first thing I did was lead generation for the business using its own method. I then started doing web development for the business. Now most of my time is divided between web design/ development and marketing related activities.
What skills and qualities have you developed through your role? I feel I have developed my self determination, as in, a lot of what I'm doing at the moment for Xsell is basically things that I have had to teach myself. One of the best and worst things about this is that when something goes wrong, for example a website isn't working, there is no one else in the business that knows what to do and so I can't pass this on to someone else, I need to work it out for myself because it's due, a client will be looking for it to work at some stage, so then I have to try until the problem is fixed.
How do you feel your placement has benefited the company? I feel I have benefited the company through contributing to new ideas and heading new projects such as the new web development service, and the marketing platform service that the business rolled out in 2017.
Find out more about internships
Our Professional Experience Programme and the Santander SME Internship Scheme offer local employers attractive mechanisms to recruit recent Ulster graduates. You can read more about these schemes on our 'Recruit our students' section.
If you are interested please contact Moira McCarthy, Career Development Manager.