Industrial placements and sponsorship: the Professional Pathway

The Professional Pathway option for undergraduate computing students at City University allows students to switch to part-time study after successfully completing the first year of their full-time course. Students on the Pathway attend the University one-day-a-week, for forty-five weeks in the year, and work four days a week in an IT-related job. They take the same examinations as their full-time peers and the four-year duration of their course is essentially the same as if they had taken a one-year sandwich placement. The scheme is attractive to students who want accelerated entry to the workplace, either because they are ambitious to begin developing their careers as early as possible or because paid employment eases the financial pressures felt by many students. The pilot cohort of fifteen students joined the Pathway in the academic year 2000-01. Their progress is being carefully monitored in a project supported by the HEFCE Innovations Fund and Sir John Cass´s Foundation. The scheme raises various educational issues including: the extended teaching year, academic performance of these students compared with their full-time peers, the possibility of student burn-out, the minimal skill-set students need to be useful to employers, workplace learning and its formal recognition, the value of extranet support for students, the students´ study habits and their time management, and the importance to them of peer-learning. It will be interesting to discover the value of these students to employers after graduation compared with their full-time peers.