Student Placement Programme
Are you looking to gain great commercial exposure and 12 months' practical experience that will help you secure a career opportunity when you complete your degree? Then we might be the business for you!
All of our 12-month Student Placements are based at our Birmingham head office and will involve real, practical work. Often this will include specific projects that add value to our business as well as allowing you to showcase your talents.
There is a strong focus on analytical and problem-solving abilities, with all our placements requiring these 2 key attributes as well as the ability to communicate with internal teams and other partner organisations.
Many of the students that join us often return to join our Graduate Programme as a direct entrant once they compete their degree.
So, what kind of experience can we offer you?
Train Planning Team
You will be working as an integral part of our Train Planning team to help us develop and amend the timetable for our customers. Depending on your interests, experience and personal preference, you could be working in any of the following areas:
Traincrew Diagramming – Ensuring all of our trains have the appropriate members of crew onboard when timetables are amended for engineering work
Short Term Planning – Amending train schedules and rolling stock deployment when engineering work means we can’t run our normal services
Long Term Planning – Producing train schedules for 6-monthly timetable changes that are efficient, robust and comply with timetable planning rules
Engineering Access Planning – Planning for engineering work on our routes across the UK and managing the impact of major projects
Track Access – Dealing with the contractual side of running a Train Operating Company including managing compensation payments from Network Rail for when we’re not able to run trains
What happens next?
If you think you have what it takes, you need to complete your online application form.
If you are interested and have the skills for more than one of the placements advertised, you will need to apply for each role separately, however, please indicate this on your application form.
If you are successful at application stage
We will then invite candidates to meet us face to face in February 2026
The Student Placement Programme begins on Monday 6th July 2026 (end date Friday 17th July 2027)
Salary: £20,084
Closing date for applications: 15th January 2026
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