Information for placement hosts

Develop your organisation, enhance a project, or take a fresh look at your business processes with our high impact, low cost researcher placement programme.

Our award-winning placements scheme offers organisations the opportunity to work with high-calibre postgraduates for up to 200 hours, part-time for between 3-6 months or on a full-time basis for 3 months.

We provide seamless administration processes, which includes recruitment and contracting, to allow you to focus on the supervision of the project itself. Placement students are on our payroll so there are no headcount or payroll requirements for the host organisation, and our contracts cover IPR, commercial confidentiality and Health and Safety. 

Funding models

As well as fully-costed placements we have several funding programmes to enable you to benefit from our Researcher Academy Placements:.

• ERDF Productivity Through Innovation Programme: This programme provides fully funded placements for SME businesses in the D2N2 LEP region, meeting the eligibility criteria, with a project that has the potential to impact upon your productivity. Businesses eligible will be required to complete diagnostic paperwork and interviews to allow us to assess the impacts the interventions have on those participating businesses.
• ESRC NPIF Accelerating Business Collaboration: This programme provides fully funded part-time or full-time 3 month placements for any sized business in the UK with a project that is looking to address business challenges and require high quality insights from a social science doctoral researcher.

Covid-19 arrangements

In line with the University’s response to Government guidance, we are making the necessary steps to support our partners in business and industry. The university continues to follow the advice from the UK authorities. We ask all businesses hosting a student on placement to follow the government’s advice for employers. Our students are still actively looking for placement opportunities and we are here to support you in hosting a placement, so please get in touch. Please email us to stay connected.