University's student placement service voted the UK's best

Coventry University’s efforts to enhance the career prospects of its students have been recognised at a national awards ceremony.

The Faculty of Engineering and Computing’s Employability and Placement Service - EC Futures – was crowned the ‘Best University Placement Service in the UK’ at the National Undergraduate Employability Awards 2015, which took place in London last week.

Now in their sixth year, the industry-sponsored NUE awards celebrate the wealth of student work placement opportunities across the country and recognise the efforts that universities, employers and the students themselves put in to making these placements a rewarding experience for all concerned. 

This year’s ceremony, which was run in association with The Guardian and was attended by many of the country’s top employers, saw over 400 entries compete for a range of awards across different categories.

Having been the only university to be shortlisted for two consecutive years, EC Futures came out on top in 2015. The judging panel of experts from industry and the university sector awarded them for their wide range of workplace initiatives, their professional approach, and for the strong relationships they’ve built with leading employers such as Jaguar Land Rover, Cummins, GE Aviation, Tata Technologies, Airbus, Intel and IBM.

EC Futures’ headline university award was presented by Jo Fairley, Co-founder of Green and Black’s chocolate.

Mike Grey, who heads up EC Futures at Coventry University, said: 

We’re delighted to have won this prestigious award.  It’s immensely satisfying to receive national recognition for our efforts and I’d like to thank my colleagues, our industrial partners and of course our students for helping to make our employability support package such a success. The award is testimony to their hard work.

We’re here to help our students achieve rewarding, professional careers. Good jobs don’t just materialise - they require a lot of thought and some careful planning – and this forward thinking philosophy underpins our work at EC Futures.

Last year 128 different technical employers recruited our placement students and, as well developing their commercial awareness and a huge range of skills, our students earned £3.2 million on placement. Coventry University is one of the only UK institutions not to charge fees for the placement year, which demonstrates the commitment and investment shown by us towards developing our students’ employability.