Available to:
- Businesses with an annual turnover of under £50 million, and under 250 employees
- Businesses registered and based in the UK
What's in it for you?
Students often bring new ideas and fresh concepts that can revolutionise the way the business see their activity, and this could open the door for further expansion.
This is a great opportunity for a company to tap into the enthusiasm of students, who can provide a valuable resource for the progress of the business.
The internships are paid £300 per week, placements over 2 weeks are half paid by the SME and half by Santander, placement of 2 weeks or less are fully paid by Santander.
Santander Universities will contribute up to a maximum of £1,500 per internship. The internships can be for a duration of between 1 and 10 weeks with the intern working on a full-time or part-time basis.
Taking an intern has given us the opportunity to do things in our business we just didn’t have time to do otherwise.
Sales Director at Forest Sofa Ltd.
What's in it for the intern?
You will give your studies and career a boost by gaining valuable skills and industry experience, plus make a real difference to an SME.
An internship can put you one step ahead of other job seekers by offering you access to the industries and companies you have always wanted to work in.
Your internship will be part-funded by the SME and part by Santander, so you won’t need to worry about your finances while you’re doing your internship.
The Santander SME Internship Programme is open to any current student or graduate from our partner universities.
Facts and figures
- More than 90% of the UK’s leading graduate employers are offering paid work experience programmes for students and recent graduates during the 2015/2016 academic year – an unprecedented 14,058 places are available.
- Three-quarters of employers provide paid vacation internships for penultimate year students and at least half offer industrial placements for undergraduates (typically lasting 6 to 12 months as part of a university degree course).
- Increasing numbers of employers now also have work experience places for first year undergraduates – over a quarter of organisations offer paid internships and two-fifths of employers run introductory courses, open days and other taster experiences.
- Almost half the recruiters who took part in the research repeated their warnings from previous years – that graduates who've had no previous work experience at all are unlikely to be successful during the selection process and have little or no chance of receiving a job offer for their organisations’ graduate programmes.
Data taken from “The Graduate Market in 2016” report from High Fliers
Case studies
To learn about the experiences of previous businesses recruiting interns, as well as the benefits internships bring to SMEs, select from the case studies listed below:
