Work placements in the UK

Advice to trainee planners from other countries looking for work placements in the UK

We do not offer a placement service ourselves, nor do we have vacancies for interns/stagiaires in our office.  Surfing the Internet for UK planning consultancies - using expressions such as town and country planning or land-use planning to narrow down the search if necessary - should lead you to the names of British consultancy companies and university departments.  The names and addresses of planning consultancies with their specialisms are also given in the on-line RTPI Consultants Directory. University departments are listed in the Education & Careers section of this web-site. 

The DirectGov website gives an A-Z list of local authorities, linking straight to most of them. This will quickly give you contact details for local planning departments. You should note that the names of UK local authorities do not always correspond to familiar names of towns, cities and counties, so you may have to search creatively. For example, London consists of the Greater London Authority/Assembly, the City of London, the City of Westminster, and 31 other Boroughs from Barking & Dagenham to Wandsworth.  Similarly, Greater Manchester covers ten metropolitan authorities including the cities of Manchester and Salford and the Boroughs of Tameside, Oldham, Bury etc (see Association of Greater Manchester Authorities). There are useful maps showing local government boundaries on the Oultwood and Gwydir websites.

If you can get to the UK, it would be easier to look in daily newspapers and in specialist journals such as our weekly magazine Planningfor ideas of companies and organisations active in the area which interests you.  Then you could write to them offering your services. Parts of the magazine including employment vacancies are available on the Planning website. You could also try registering with a London-based recruitment agency specialising in employment in the public sector or the built environment. The classified advertising pages in Planning magazine sometimes carry advertisements for these agencies and consultants, or you can obtain a list from the RTPI International Affairs Officer.  These consultancies are particularly good for finding work in London, where there is often a shortage of mid-career planners because of the high cost of family housing.  Employment agencies in the UK do not charge the job seeker for their services.  

It is usually ineffective to send a letter or e-mail addressed generally to the organisation, rather than to a named person in the organisation.  The approach may not be answered at all, and if it is, the answer will almost certainly be negative.  It is always worthwhile trying to find out the name of senior person in the organisation, using the Internet, the telephone, or one of the Directories mentioned above.  If possible, follow up a letter with a phone call, too.  For non-native speakers of English, this action would reassure your contact that your English is good.  No respectable organisation in Britain would employ anyone who was not known to them through a formal application for employment which would usually include a face-to-face interview.   We understand that this is difficult when you want only a short placement and are far away.  A letter or e-mail should nevertheless indicate your willingness to travel at your own expense to Britain for interview.

If you are willing to start by taking non-planning work, temporary and casual jobs are advertised in local newspapers all over Britain, for example the (London) Evening Standard, the Northern Echo, the Eastern Daily Press and the Western Daily Press. The Employment Services of all EU countries are linked up in a computer network, so if you go to the Employment Service in a large town near you, the staff there may be able to tell you about vacancies in Britain. If you are interested in an unpaid placement in a particular city, you could ask locally-based contacts to find out from the Voluntary Service Centre in that town or city whether it can give information on placements. Most large towns and cities have such a Centre; for example, there are 25 in the London area alone.

Finally, barriers are created by language, by distance and by unfamiliarity with the education systems of other countries. You can greatly improve your chances of finding a placement here if you use personal contacts at home to overcome some of these barriers.  Is there someone in your family, your circle of friends, or on the staff of your university, who could write a personal letter of introduction and recommendation to an organisation in Britain?  If a person who knows you well writes to someone they know in Britain, it can often break through the barriers. The organisation might be a local authority (county, district or borough council), a national organisation, or a voluntary pressure group in the environmental sphere.