Posted by Ollie on 20 Jan 2023
Peer-to-peer reviews are a staple part of society today. Whether TripAdvisor for hotels and restaurants, Trustpilot for products and services, Or RateMyPlacement.co.uk for work experience.
Born in the 2000s, students today have grown up with review platforms, trusting and valuing their importance when making important decisions.
We launched RateMyPlacement.co.uk in 2007, allowing students to rate and review their work experience to better educate and inspire students following in their footsteps.
Throughout our journey, we’ve kept the review questions the same and focused them on the employer, highlighting the job role, the atmosphere at work and the social opportunities, but less so universities.
With work experience becoming an increasingly important part of university life for students, universities play such a vital role in helping students to prepare and gain this valuable work experience.
How do universities rank when it comes to their commitment to supporting students with their work experience journey?
70,000 reviews, over one million ratings and well over 15 million words later, we’ve decided it’s time to try and answer that question!
Which resources at your university did you find most (and least) useful when looking for work experience? (Free text answer)
How would you rate the resources available at your university when looking for work experience? - 1 = Poor, 5 = Excellent
How would you rate the support you received from your university when looking for work experience? - 1 = Poor, 5 = Excellent
Feedback - Having impartial reviews from university students is important. Understanding their point of view will provide first-hand insight into how students found the resources and support received by universities around the work experience process.
With work experience such an important contributing factor for students getting a graduate job - and with the new Graduate Outcomes survey released in 2020 - greater importance is being placed on the destination of graduates by HESA.
Benchmarks - Every university wants to know how it compares to other universities. Many rankings cover all aspects of university: The Times Higher Education, The Guardian Best Universities which highlights “within career after 15 months” and The Complete University Guide which highlights “graduate prospects”.
But none focus on work experience during university. Given rankings and tables define strategic aims and objectives, we feel employability and work experience is under-represented.
By collecting this data, we’ll be able to rank all universities from top to bottom in how well they’ve fared in terms of the resources and support they provide students.
Benchmark - Compare yourselves to other universities. See where you’re doing brilliantly and where you can improve.
Learn - Read the impartial feedback we'll share with you directly to improve your service.
Engagement - We hear students don’t always engage with their careers or placement services because they aren’t aware of the quality of the service provided.
By encouraging reviews and being part of the table, you’ll highlight the quality of the resources and support you offer students, which will in turn inspire more students to engage with you!
Good point! We have taken the ratings across all review questions when calculating the university table (you can see all these questions below).
The university that performs the best for work experience will be subject to the following criteria across all reviews from students at their university in 2022.
Average ratings across both questions - How well did they rate their work experience?
Volume of reviews - Did many students give feedback?
January - Launch!
March - Announce table and winners of the ‘Best University for Work Experience’ table at the RateMyPlacement Awards 2023.
The upcoming ‘Best University for Work Experience’ table for 2023 cannot be influenced. All student reviews from 2022 have already been submitted.
However, the ‘Best University for Work Experience’ table for 2024 will be created from all student reviews submitted on RateMyPlacement.co.uk in 2023.
If you’d like to increase your position or try and get into the table for 2024, you can encourage students who have done all forms of work experience to review between April 2023 & November 2023.
Happy to answer any questions you may have. We’ve evolved RateMyPlacement.co.uk through building great relationships with universities and key university networks, so welcome any feedback you may have on this exciting new development.
Best of luck and looking forward to revealing the ‘Best University for Work Experience at the RateMyPlacement Awards on Thursday 16th March!
Ollie