Lukus is a System Architect for Pegasystems. He works in professional services and consults and develops customer journeys in a customer relationship management software provided by Pega as a service.
My placement helped a lot with people skills. I did my placement as an Associate Software Engineer and was mainly focusing on manual testing, the technical skills I gained at Accenture were not re-used in my new work however the soft skills helped tremendously. Working for Accenture also gave me a lot of bargaining power when applying for Pega, it gave me something to talk about during my interview.
Seriously! It's a great experience. If you're going to be studying and not doing an industrial placement you will be a little lost after graduating. You most likely will have never worked in a professional environment which uses the skills you learn during your degree.
Going on an industrial placement will help you leverage the skills you learn at university and you will pick up stuff that is only discussed in theory during your courses. A key example is where I learnt about "Scrum" in my course but I didn't get a feel for what it actually is or how it affects the working environment with a team until I applied it in my placement.
In addition, applying for your first job will be MUCH easier once you have a year of experience with a company. You'll be a fresh graduate but with 1 year of professional experience under your belt already. Recruiters definitely focus on you more compared to those who don't have any experience in their field.
It will not only give you something to talk about during your interviews but also give you the opportunity to try out a job as well as see a bunch of others. I got to know what everybody on my team did and their roles and it gave me a really good idea of what I might want to (or not want to) do in the future. There's so many benefits of doing an industrial placement vs not doing one.