For business
Access data and AI talent
We connect businesses with a rich pool of data and AI talent
The Data Lab Academy Placement Programme connects your organisation with Scotland’s top MSc data and AI students for a focused 8–12–week project. You scope the problem (with our support), we handle recruitment and matching, and a student works on it full-time — supported throughout by an academic supervisor and our placements team. Previous projects have delivered automated workflows, live dashboards, validated AI prototypes, and strategic analysis, shaped around each organisation’s specific context and needs.
Why host a placement
Many organisations have data and AI projects they’d like to pursue, but limited capacity to take them on alongside day-to-day work. A placement gives that project dedicated focus for 8–12 weeks.
If you already have a backlog of project ideas, a placement is a way to move one from a proposal into a working proof of concept. If you don’t yet have a defined project, we can help you scope one using your organisation’s existing datasets and priorities.
10+ years established
Supporting placements since 2016
100+ students per year
Access talent across data and AI courses
71% host organisations
Rated their placement as 9/10 or 10/10
Our placement student impressed the team with their AI expertise. Their chatbot project was so successful that our Customer Experience team requested full integration into our product. We have now welcomed the graduate to the team full-time.
Ed Shearer
Elementz
In good company
Over 1,000 organisations have engaged with us, building connections and accessing talent across Scotland’s data and AI ecosystem.
We’ve placed students across the public sector, finance, energy, health, and more — from the Scottish Government and Police Scotland to NatWest Group and Tesco Bank, and Scottish Water and EDF Energy. Hosts range from large enterprises to small teams taking on their first data project.
Why organisations choose our placement programme
- MSc-level specialisation: Masters students already specialising in your problem domain, from natural language processing of legal documents to time-series forecasting in energy markets.
- A dedicated resource for the full project: The student’s only priority for 8–12 weeks is your project, giving it the sustained attention that’s often hard to find internally alongside day-to-day work.
- Risk-free testing: Explore new technology — generative AI, advanced machine learning operations, a new data pipeline — without committing to a consultant or a permanent hire. Even where the approach doesn’t pan out, you keep the research and the insight.
- A proven talent pipeline: There’s no expectation to hire — but if you’re weighing up future roles, a placement lets you see how someone works over three months before any decision is made. Several organisations, including Utopi, NatWest, and Aberdeenshire Council, have subsequently hired their students.
What organisations actually get
Every project is scoped around your organisation’s needs, so the outcome varies — but each one is built around a defined, usable deliverable rather than open-ended “work experience.” Past placements have produced things like:
- Production-ready automation scripts
- Live dashboards connected to organisational data
- Strategic analysis and recommendations on a specific business question
- Validated prototypes for AI tools, from anomaly detection to guardrails
How it works
From the first conversation to the student start date takes around three months — most projects are scoped and matched between January and April, and most placements are delivered from June to September, but we’d like to hear from you at any time. Here’s what it looks like step by step:
- Scope and submit: Get in touch, and we’ll set up an initial call to shape your idea — or your existing data and business needs — into a placement-ready project. Submitting takes about 30 minutes if you already have a clear direction.
- Recruit and match: We advertise the role, review every application, and hand you a curated shortlist of top MSc candidates with CVs and cover letters.
- Interview and select: You interview the shortlist and make your offer.
- Pre-onboarding: We connect you with the student’s academic supervisor to plan the kick-off.
- The project: Your student gets to work, with regular check-ins between you, the student, and their academic supervisor. We stay in touch throughout the 8-12-week project.
- Handover and next steps: A final presentation and report, plus a conversation about extension, consultancy, or hiring the student permanently, if relevant.
Real outcomes, across sectors
Every project is different, but here’s what a few of them looked like in practice.
Scottish Government (RESAS)
A recurring analytical task was eating up a week of analyst time every cycle, leaving little room for higher-value policy work. The student built an R-based automation script covering the process end-to-end, with documentation so the team could run and extend it independently. Turnaround dropped to a single day — an 85% reduction — and the host began using the new process within a week of handover.
Scottish Water
A newly procured water-quality instrument was generating valuable data that was stuck in raw, source-only formats, with no accessible view for the wider business. The student built a Power BI dashboard and a repeatable transformation pipeline from scratch — the organisation’s first end-to-end use of Microsoft Fabric. The host was using the dashboard the same morning it was handed over, with plans to roll it out business-wide to track changes in water quality.
NatWest Group
As NatWest explored deploying generative AI, it needed a practical way to detect prompt-injection attacks. They needed a detection method that was proven to work in practice, not just theoretically sound. The student researched and implemented a cosine-similarity-based detection method, then validated its performance with a structured evaluation that the team could reuse. Results were strong enough that the team is assessing integration into their existing AI guardrails service.
Aberdeenshire Council
Ahead of procuring a new customer relationship platform, the Council needed evidence of data quality across systems and how services actually operated day to day, rather than assumptions. The student ran a structured data-quality assessment, engaged frontline staff across services, and presented findings to senior stakeholders including the Head of Service. The findings directly informed procurement strategy, reducing the risk of buying a tool that didn’t match operational reality.
Read more of our case studies here.
Having a student who was engaged and keen to contribute created real collaboration. Reviewing measures, discussing visuals and improving the overall design of the dashboards led to better products.
Erica Belcher
Scottish Government
FAQs
Placements are designed to be relatively light-touch when scoped well. You’ll need to provide a kick-off, regular check-ins with the student, a midpoint progress review and a final handover. The student’s academic supervisor is also involved throughout, including regular check-ins and as a technical sounding board.
The placement project and dissertation are designed to work together. During scoping, we help define a base goal – a minimum viable outcome that can be achieved within the 8-12 week placement – alongside a stretch goal if the student has capacity to go further.
Data access and confidentiality are agreed as part of the project setup. Depending on the project, this can include keeping data within your own environment, using synthetic or sampled data, and exporting only aggregated or anonymised outputs. Students are employed directly by your organisation and follow existing controls. NDA and IP agreements are also standard practice, especially for projects with financial institutions and healthcare organisations.
Students regularly work with tools they haven’t used before and get up to speed quickly — this can be accelerated with pre-work before they start, exams permitting. In our experience, hosts tend to value a student’s ability to learn fast more than an exact tool-for-tool match.
Hosts pay the Real Living Wage (plus standard employment on-costs) for an 8-12 week placement.
That’s fine. We can help you turn an existing idea, data, or business need into a placement-ready project. The initial scoping conversation is designed to help shape the problem and define what the student should deliver during the 8-12-week placement.
Tell us a bit about your organisation and what you’re hoping to achieve, and we’ll be in touch
