Transforming business management placement students into teachers

Abstract

A period of work placement is widely recognised to be one of the most effective ways to enhance an undergraduate’s employability and work-readiness. However, at present, the value of all the learning gained on the work placement remains with the placement student. The authors of this viewpoint paper propose an approach to widen the benefits of a work placement, by sharing an element of industrial or commercial knowledge gained with fellow undergraduates and with teaching staff, via a delivered teaching presentation. In doing so, brings work experience to a wider group of undergraduates and strengthens the link between education and industrial practice. The paper explores the benefits of the described scheme, discusses an approach to operationalising it and some of the potential challenges.

Business undergraduate students to teachers: The proposition

A work placement activity, as part of a degree programme, can help develop graduates’ transferable skills (Paisley and Paisley, 2010), especially communication and team-working (Jackson, 2013), both of which are skills desired by employers (CMI, 2021). The knowledge and experiences gained in the workplace while on placement not only develop a student’s employability credentials but can also have value in the learning environment, with placement experience deemed to have a positive impact on subsequent academic performance (Brooks and Youngson, 2016). It is the integration of real-world experience in the learning environment that is seen by Ehiyazarayan and Barraclough (2016) as being a contributory factor to an individual’s learning journey.

Yet, placement students are currently the only ones to benefit from the real-world experience of undertaking a placement period. Placement students are also more likely to have higher socioeconomic status (SES), thus increasing inequality (Smith et al., 2019). However, there is an opportunity for individuals on business degrees to contribute to the learning and teaching activities of their peers, by sharing practical and industrial/commercial insights gleaned on their placement, with their fellow students, via a formal classroom teaching session. This will give a multiplying effect to enhance the value of placements, and also brings a practitioner-focus to the classroom by demonstrating theory in practice.

While knowledge sharing is a key feature of universities (Annansingh et al., 2018), there have been calls for increasing, and formalising (Gamlath and Wilson, 2020) the processes by which students can share knowledge (Castenada and Cuellar, 2021). Yuen and Majid (2007) find that students are generally receptive to knowledge sharing, and in professions such as medicine where placements are common, student teaching of near peers is well valued (Weyrich et al., 2008) and has been reported as being as effective as that of tutors (see for example, Abay et al., 2017). In a business undergraduate context, this could not be understood as a community of practice (Wenger, 2000) because most students do not go on placements, and most students’ learning will be acquisitive rather than participatory. Nonetheless, this proposed approach provides the opportunity for knowledge sharing for business students to add-value to their peers’ learning.

During the work placement period there is typically the requirement for the student to maintain a journal to reflect upon objectives, enjoyment, skills, progress, successes and performance (see for example: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/media/17331/download). Moreover, Hovland and Johannesson (2015) also highlight the detailing of emotions, perceptions towards others and reflection of own practice as part of the placement process. This is very much internalised and individual knowledge. The proposed activity here suggests that Business undergraduates on placement more deeply engage with their workplaces’ industrial and commercial practices and then share that knowledge learned with their fellow students and teaching staff, as part of a learning programme or module. If for example, a business management student on placement, had been involved in developing a new product or service for the host organisation, then by describing the processes of how the new product development was managed and sharing practical perspectives, in an appropriate learning classroom format, would be of huge value to enrich other students’ learning. It provides the authenticity that gives knowledge meaning. Thomas (2008) advocates putting the student at the centre of learning activities which this suggested approach does. In addition, Kember (2016), feels that real-life examples which will be drawn from the placement experience, not only provide greater validity for the topic being studied, but are a primary source of learner motivation. This approach not only does both of those but also strengthens the link between education and industrial practice. A student one of us recently supervised on placement had been involved in the setting up of a project management dashboard of performance metrics, to help managers identify when projects were going astray. To share her experiences on the second-year undergraduate project management module would have been insightful for students and staff, covering project controls.

There are other advantages that this approach could bring. Ten Cate and Durning (2007) list 12 reasons why peer assisted learning is effective in a medical context, some of which are valid for business students. It will mean that the undergraduates’ education is given by someone much closer to their cognitive level who has a tacit understanding of the problems the students face, and it also provides a suitable role model of a successful business student. Many of the other benefits accrue to the placement student. They will practice teaching, a role for future team leaders, develop team leadership skills and confidence and also be forced to understand the theoretical background of the lesson they give, so have to become active rather than passive learners.

Business undergraduate students to teachers: The suggested process

Once placement students have returned to their university post placement, they are invited to deliver a class or tutorial relating to a topic relevant to some element of learning, that has taken place while on placement. Beforehand, there will need to be a discussion between the course lecturer and the student in order to match the element of placement learning to the course/module curriculum content. This will also ensure a clear pedagogical reason to justify the session by making it relevant to the module, and therefore, the learning of other students (Jafari and Redden, 2024).

As not every good student can teach (Clements and Gooden, 2025), clear guidance would need to be provided by the lecturer to the individual as to the expectations and length of the presentation. Content for the presentation would need to be scrutinised by the lecturer prior to delivery, to ensure it matched the curriculum, was understandable (i.e. not technical) and provided sufficient learning at an appropriate level. This additional time will mean that this approach is not a cost saving measure (Ten Cate and Durning, 2007), unless the Business School has a skills tutor who can teach the student to teach, or many students are doing this as part of their learning process. The topic may also have to be carefully chosen. For example, the majority of medical evidence is about teaching clinical skills (Yu et al., 2011), where the teacher and student both have similar skill levels, rather than high-level theory where the lecturer’s expertise matters. Nonetheless, business students will typically deliver presentations as part of the degree programme and should, therefore, be comfortable at standing in front of an audience. The post-placement business student would then deliver a learning session based on an aspect of the placement experience to the class, with questions from the student body to be encouraged. Given, it is a student presenting to their class peers, should mean responding and discussion are more comfortably facilitated.

The approach described mimics the use of external guest speakers, especially industry experts, something that is often used in higher education (Jablon-Roberts and McCracken, 2022). While the external guest speaker carries more gravitas than a student, represents more of a senior role model (Ma, 2025) and can offer career advice and networking tips (Ji et al., 2021), the placement student will be more cost-effective, can empathise with the needs of the students more fully and may well represent a more relevant role model to inspire other students. Being internal to the institution, will make the student speaker more readily accessible to the lecturing staff to discuss matters beforehand and agree the teaching session.

The arranged delivered session could be recorded for future use in learning and teaching sessions. Alternatively, if the student is reluctant to deliver a class teaching session, they instead, record the learning, for example, as an embedded PowerPoint, which can be then shared with class peers via the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). Either way, the video becomes a learning asset for future use. Alternatively, for a presentation-reluctant student, the knowledge could be written up the activity as a vignette, which could be similarly used in tutorials or to support future classes’ learning.

The modified approach to the proposal is that students teach near peers, such as those students a year or two below them. This has the advantage that universities tend to have a well-established peer assisted learning scheme (PALS) in place to use as a framework and the role modelling would be more explicitly stated (Yu et al., 2011). This also reduces the effect of any badly taught session, as it will not be final year material.

Adjustments may need to be made to placement documentation prior to the student going on work placement to incorporate the intention for the student to present an element of learning to a student group on returning to university. Moreover, agreement for what could involve the sharing of commercially sensitive information might have to be agreed by the placement host company. Moreover, not every student has a positive work placement experience. If the student was working at a low level on mundane tasks for example, or was working anyway and could not afford to go on placement (Smith et al., 2019), they might have nothing worthwhile to share with fellow students or reconcile to any of the modules studied. However, this should be ascertained by the lecturer before committing the placement student to a presentation, although this does increase the workload burden to the individual member of staff. These also mean that presenting part of a lesson cannot be a requirement for work for a module and so students motivated by performance rather than deep learning are less likely to do it, pushing the onus of doing this onto those students who are already willing to do it.

Conclusion

This proposed activity moves beyond a student merely sharing their personal experience of their placement and how they have developed skills or personal capacity but requires the development of methods to make explicit the acquired knowledge, practical applications, industrial insights and commercial know-how, for use in the classroom to enhance the learning of other students. In this way, students become learning agents of the learning curriculum, by delivering a taught session of a key topic of a relevant curriculum, through a chosen medium. The activity also strengthens the link between education and industrial practice, something employers are typically critical of. Additional benefits of the proposal include:

• Planning for delivery will make the process of reflection much more tangible and meaningful to the individual, thus adding value for the post-placement student.

• The content will also serve to present current industrial problems and practice to benefit the academic staff concerned

• The presentation may potentially be stored for future use in the virtual learning space, in classroom teaching, or for students’ private study forums, providing benefit to the institution

While it is acknowledged that the proposed approach is applied to business management undergraduate students, there is potential to apply the approach to other disciplines across the university sector where students returning from placement, will have acquired up-to-date workplace experience that could be readily shared among their peers, in an acceptable format.