You spent a placement year inside a company, you have a dissertation due in the spring, and the obvious topic is the firm you already know. Then the questions start: will they let you, what can you write down, who has to sign what, and how do you write a chapter about a company that can read it. This guide answers those questions in the order they arise for UK business, management, marketing and HR students, from the first email to your line manager to the embargo form you file with the finished dissertation.
The short version is that a placement-company dissertation is one of the strongest projects an undergraduate can run, because access is the scarcest resource in business research and you already have it. It is also the project most likely to stall in March, because the access was never formalised, the data turned out to be confidential, or the student discovered too late that being an insider is a methodological position that has to be argued, not just admitted. Tesify can build the chapters around your own access story, your own data and your own analysis once the decisions below are made; it cannot make them for you.
Is a dissertation on your placement company a case study?
Usually, and you should call it one. A single-organisation study of a real problem, using more than one source of evidence, is a case study in the sense set out by Robert Yin’s Case Study Research and Applications, now in its sixth edition, and by Kathleen Eisenhardt’s 1989 paper in the Academy of Management Review on building theory from case study research. Naming the design matters because it tells the marker what standard to apply: a case study is judged on the quality of its evidence chain and the honesty of its boundaries, not on whether the findings generalise to every firm in the sector. Say early, in the introduction and again in the methodology, that the study is a single instrumental case and that its purpose is depth.
The alternative framings are a consultancy-style diagnostic, where the deliverable is a recommendation to the firm, and an action research project, where you changed something during the placement and are evaluating it. Both are legitimate on many UK business programmes; both need to be declared, because a marker who expects a case study and receives a consultancy report will mark the missing theory.
How do you get formal access, and from whom?
Informal access is not access. The line manager who said “of course, use anything you like” in July is not the person who can authorise a study in October, and may have left. You need a named gatekeeper with the authority to say yes: typically an HR business partner, a head of department or, in a small firm, the owner. Ask for a short written permission, on company letterhead or from a company email address, stating that the organisation agrees to participate in a student research project, what the project is, what data or people you may approach, and any conditions. Your university ethics form will ask for exactly this document, and most business school ethics committees will not approve a firm-based study without it.
Ask in the placement, not after it. Access negotiated while you have a badge and a desk is granted in an afternoon; access requested by a former placement student from a university email takes weeks and is often refused by default. The single most useful thing you can do in the last month of a placement is to leave with a signed access letter and a named contact.
What does the NDA you signed actually cover?
Almost every placement contract contains a confidentiality clause, and many firms add a separate non-disclosure agreement. Read it before you write a word. Most clauses prohibit disclosure of confidential business information to third parties; a dissertation submitted to a university and read by two markers is a disclosure, and the clause applies unless the company waives it for the project. The access letter should therefore either state that the dissertation is permitted under the confidentiality agreement, or list what remains off limits: customer names, pricing, financial figures below a stated level of aggregation, product roadmaps, anything covered by a client’s own NDA.
Three practical rules follow. Never use documents you were not explicitly given for the project, even if you still have them. Aggregate or index any figure the firm considers sensitive (report a 12 per cent change, not the two revenue numbers behind it). And agree the anonymisation up front: a pseudonym for the company, a description by sector and size rather than name, and job titles generalised enough that a colleague cannot be identified. A dissertation that says “a mid-sized UK logistics firm” and is internally consistent about it loses nothing academically.
Do you need ethics approval, and what will the committee ask?
Yes, on every UK business programme we know of, and the process is the same departmental one described in our guide to ethics approval for an undergraduate dissertation. The committee will ask four questions specific to a firm-based study. First, organisational consent: the access letter. Second, individual consent: colleagues you interview or survey must consent as individuals, and the letter from the head of department does not consent on their behalf; they must be told they can refuse without it reaching their manager. Third, power: if you supervised anyone during the placement, or if a participant could believe their answers will reach their line manager, the committee will want to know how you prevented coercion, usually by recruiting through a general invitation rather than a personal ask and by keeping raw data away from the firm. Fourth, data protection: interview recordings and survey responses that identify employees are personal data under the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, so you need a lawful basis (consent, for a student project), a storage plan on university systems rather than a personal laptop, and a deletion date.
Build the participant information sheet so that it answers all four, and send the draft to your contact at the firm before submitting it to the committee. Companies rarely object to research; they object to being surprised.
How do you handle being an insider?
This is the part most placement dissertations get wrong, and the part that separates a 2:1 from a first. You are not a neutral observer of the company; you worked there, you have opinions about it, and your participants know you. The methodological literature treats this as a position to be argued rather than a contamination to be hidden. Brannick and Coghlan’s 2007 paper in Organizational Research Methods, “In Defense of Being ‘Native’”, sets out the case: insider researchers have pre-understanding that outsiders cannot buy, and the price is a duty of reflexivity about role duality and access to politics.
Write a positionality section in the methodology of 300 to 500 words. State your role, your dates, who you reported to, and what you knew before the study began. Then state what you did about it: interview protocols written before fieldwork and followed; a research diary distinguishing what you observed as a researcher from what you remembered as an employee; a supervisor or peer who read your coding for signs of prior belief; and a deliberate search for evidence against your own expectation. Markers reward this; they penalise the dissertation that never mentions the student worked there.
What data can a placement dissertation actually use?
More than most students realise, provided each source was cleared. The typical single-case design triangulates three:
- Interviews with six to twelve colleagues across levels, recorded with consent, analysed thematically. Recruit by open invitation; do not interview your own former manager unless the power question has been answered.
- Documents: process maps, internal reports, policy documents, meeting minutes, training material, cleared item by item in the access letter. Documentary evidence is what makes a case study more than a set of opinions.
- Quantitative internal data: sales, churn, absence, complaint or productivity figures, provided in aggregated form. If the firm will release a monthly series, a before-and-after comparison around a change you observed is a legitimate quantitative strand, and the methodology chapter conventions for it are set out in our guide to the methodology chapter of a business dissertation.
A survey of all staff is usually the weakest option: response rates inside a single firm are low unless the firm pushes it, and if the firm pushes it the consent problem returns. The response-rate evidence in our analysis of business dissertation surveys is worth reading before you promise a questionnaire in the proposal.
How do you write up a company that will read it?
Assume the firm will ask for a copy, and write so that you can give them one. That means the findings chapter reports what the evidence shows, including the uncomfortable parts, in language that is evidential rather than evaluative: “four of nine interviewees described the onboarding process as inconsistent between sites” rather than “onboarding is chaotic”. Recommendations, if your programme requires them, go in their own chapter and are framed as options with costs. Anonymise consistently from the first page: the pseudonym, the sector description and the generalised job titles must not slip, and a find-and-replace pass on the final draft is not optional. If a finding cannot be reported without identifying an individual, drop it and say in the limitations that some material was withheld for confidentiality; markers accept that, and it reads as ethical maturity.
Should you embargo the dissertation?
Most UK universities allow a dissertation to be marked without being deposited in an open repository, and many have a formal restricted-access or embargo option for work containing commercially sensitive material, typically for one to five years. Ask your programme office for the form early, because some require the company to countersign. An embargo does not affect the mark; it affects who can read the work afterwards. If the firm insists on reading the dissertation before submission, agree a factual-accuracy check with a deadline, and make clear in writing that they may correct facts but not findings. Keep the correspondence.
The timeline that works
- Last month of placement: agree the topic with your contact, obtain the access letter, list the cleared documents, confirm the anonymisation.
- First month of the final year: proposal, with the design named and the insider position declared, using the structure in our guide to writing a dissertation proposal.
- Before Christmas: ethics approval, participant information sheet reviewed by the firm, interview protocol written.
- January to February: fieldwork, remotely if you have left the firm; documents analysed alongside.
- March: analysis, findings, and the positionality section written from the research diary.
- April: write-up, anonymisation pass, embargo form, factual check by the firm if agreed.
When the access is sorted and the chapters are still blank
The hardest part of a placement dissertation is not the writing; it is the six decisions above, and once they are made the material is richer than any other undergraduate project. What stalls students at that point is turning a year of knowledge, a folder of transcripts and a set of cleared documents into chapters in the right order. Tesify builds the dissertation section by section from your own case, your own evidence and your own analysis, keeps the pseudonym consistent across every chapter, and formats the references in Harvard as you go. The judgement, the findings and every sentence are 100% written by you; what you get is a chapter that exists.
Frequently asked questions
Can I write my dissertation about the company I did my placement with?
Yes, on almost every UK business programme, provided the company gives written permission, your ethics committee approves the design and you declare your insider position in the methodology. It is one of the strongest projects an undergraduate can run because access is already solved.
What if the company says no?
Ask what specifically they object to; often it is a named dataset rather than the study. Offer stronger anonymisation, an embargo, or a document-free design based on interviews. If the answer is still no, keep the sector and the problem and study a different organisation, or use published data; the sector sections in our dissertation topic ideas by subject are the fallback.
Do I have to name the company?
No, and usually you should not. A pseudonym with a description by sector, size and region is standard, satisfies most confidentiality clauses, and costs nothing academically as long as it is applied consistently from the first page.
Can I use documents I still have from the placement?
Only those explicitly cleared in the access letter. Material you kept without permission is covered by your confidentiality clause and by data protection law, and using it is both a breach of contract and a potential academic misconduct finding.
Is being an insider a weakness the marker will penalise?
Not if you argue it. Insider research is a recognised position with its own literature; the penalty is for ignoring it. A positionality section that states your role and the steps you took to manage it earns marks.
Does Tesify see my company’s confidential data?
You decide what goes in. Work from the anonymised, aggregated material you have already cleared for the dissertation itself, exactly as you would with any writing tool, and keep raw data on university systems as your ethics approval requires.
Is using Tesify on a placement dissertation academic misconduct?
No, provided your university permits AI assistance and you follow its declaration rules. Tesify structures and drafts around your own evidence and analysis; the findings, the argument and the final text are yours, and you should declare its use where your handbook asks you to.
How much does it cost?
There is a free tier that covers the core drafting and bibliography features, so you can build the first chapter before deciding whether the paid plan is worth it for the rest of the project.