Chemical Engineering Industrial Placement 2024

Are you looking to gain valuable real world work experience and help positively impact the lives of others?

A GSK internship offers you the opportunity to kickstart your career – to take on a real role with genuine impact. You’ll take on challenging tasks within live projects or assignments. You’ll also get to learn from others in your team and other parts of GSK whilst developing your skills and gaining valuable experience for wherever the future takes you.

About the role

A Chemical Engineering placement in one of our GSK manufacturing sites will give you hands on practical application of the theory from university. The GSK Pharmaceutical Supply Chain produces Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (API) that are transformed into dosage forms for our patients. This encompasses a huge variety of chemical engineering unit operations: chemistry performed at scale (10-330 kg, depending on the product); fermentation; solids processing for tablets, inhalers, creams and ointments (batch sizes up to tonnes). This presents chemical engineering challenges: safely handling large quantities of hazardous liquids and powders; heating/cooling; mixing; correct solid microstructure. Product quality is also vital: ensuring the correct quantities of materials are charged to the reactor at the correct time and ensuring equipment avoids any contamination. Many processes are automated so chemical engineers are heavily involved with the plant control software.

During your 12 months with us, you’ll gain experience in areas such as:

• Changes to plant: from inception of the improvement, design and functional testing to commissioning
• Seeing first-hand how equipment and its associated control system operates
• Safety and/or quality risk assessments
• Project management and planning
• Leading root cause analysis investigations
• Sustainability and/or process safety improvement projects
• A wide range of manufacturing processes depending on the site.

Whichever role you go into you will be applying the skills you already have and will develop new skills such as team working, effective communication and time management. You will work with and learn from an experienced team of multi-disciplined engineers. They will coach and mentor you during your year to help you achieve your potential.

Who are we looking for?

• A passion for chemical engineering in a pharmaceutical manufacturing environment
• Attention to detail
• Strong analytical skills
• Drive to get things done with good time management and organizational skills
• To be a team player and able to work with a variety of stakeholders
• Continuous improvement mindset
• Excel / Data skills
• Ability to demonstrate qualities aligned with GSK Culture

Roles/Locations

Please read below about the 5 different locations/roles we are recruiting for across our Industrial Placements. Please note, these are distinct placements and so when you apply you will be able to select preferences of where you would like to be placed if successful. We will accommodate your preference where possible.

Role/Location 1: Barnard Castle

The Barnard Castle site is located in the Northeast of England, within the County Durham countryside. Barnard Castle is a key secondary site for GSK with a large number of New Products coming through development at site. We manufacture and supply a huge range of different pharmaceutical products from Sterile Products (Syringes and Vials) to Liquid Inhalations and Dermatologicals. We have recently opened a new state of the art aseptic digital facility producing biopharmaceuticals. The successful candidate will operate across and within both the operations and the capital project engineering teams. This is comprised of approximately 45 personnel and is supported by a team of technical experts in the ways of work. The role provides a broad scope of work that will support the site in achieving product outputs as well as compliance in Safety and Quality Standards. You will also support current capital projects to the agreed scope of works, timescale and cost, and be responsible for co-ordinating designated activities from implementation through to the client handover. There is opportunity to support and eventually lead Root Cause Analysis for Process Issues mainly focussed within site services/utilities or the manufacturing areas: Integrated Syringe filling, Liquid Vial Filling, Liquid Inhalators and Dermatologicals.

Role/Location 2: Montrose

Our 45-acre primary manufacturing site at Montrose is located between the North Sea and the Angus Glens and is within easy reach of Dundee and Aberdeen. It is our largest UK chemical manufacturing facility which celebrated its 70th anniversary in 2022. The site has state-of-the-art manufacturing and testing facilities and produces a wide range of active ingredients for some of our most important medicines including respiratory, HIV and dermatological products. Every day, an estimated 30 million people take a medicine that includes ingredients from Montrose.

As a chemical engineering placement student at Montrose, you could be involved in the support to day-to-day manufacture of Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs), capital projects, sustainability initiatives or cleaning/process improvements. There are multiple roles available that will offer you opportunities to consolidate, and gain first-hand experience, on what you have learned during your studies about unit operations such as crystallisation, distillation, chemical reactions, drying, filtration etc. You will also have opportunities to gain experience in plant design, automation, process safety, technical transfers, project management, sustainability, quality, etc, in a highly regulated pharmaceutical environment. This will not only help you develop further your technical skills but also, through interactions with other functions on site, leadership and communication skills, fundamental to your performance. You will have the opportunity to work alongside, and learn from, other Process Engineers and other teams with vast experience in the manufacture of Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients.

Role/Location 3: Ware

Ware is the largest GSK site in the UK with a thriving early talent community. The Ware Global Supply Chain site manufactures and supplies oral solid dose tablets (for HIV and oncology) and respiratory devices (for asthma and COPD) to over 140 countries, as well as to patients participating in clinical trials, playing a key role in new product introduction. Ware site is located less than a mile from the station, with regular rail links through to London Liverpool Street, taking around 45 minutes

If successful in securing the position, you will have opportunity to work within our technical and operations teams putting your university knowledge into practical applications through hands on experience with our processes and products. This may include identifying and working on process improvements, developing manufacturing processes for new products, investigating and determining the root causes of deviations, writing technical reports, and assisting in analysing and visualising data from our manufacturing processes. Your role may allow you to experience several of the manufacturing processes in operation at the site including powder micronisation, powder blending and granulation, tablet compression and coating, product filling into inhaler devices, inhaler device assembly, and product packaging.

Role/Location 4: Worthing

The Worthing site manufactures more than 34 million packs of antibiotics each year, and our 60-year legacy has seen generations of talented people proudly producing our high-quality medicines for patients around the globe. The Worthing site is situated approximately 2 miles from the South Coast and located at the foot of the picturesque South Downs; We are also only 15 miles from the cosmopolitan and cultural city of Brighton and Hove. Worthing boasts the opportunity to combine city, countryside and coast all in one location, and even offers rail links to London in under 90 minutes.

At Worthing, we have several opportunities available for chemical engineering students in our site technical team and in our Bio Process Science (BPS) team.

The role within the site technical team involves supporting the manufacture of our Oral products, comprising process steps from powder blending, milling, tablet compression, coating of tablets and secondary packaging. You will be exposed to project work, day to day plant support activities, complaint and deviation root cause investigations, validation, process improvement activities, data analysis and much more.

The role in our Bio Process Science (BPS) team will give you hands-on, technical experience in the scale-up and optimisation of the processes used to manufacture biopharmaceutical products. You will gain experience in the downstream processing of enzyme’s, small molecules, monoclonal antibodies, and vaccines. You will develop an understanding of unit operations such as cell disruption, clarification, concentration, immobilisation, filtration, and chromatography. The work is predominantly laboratory based with a focus on data generation and interpretation in order to contribute towards the development of efficient processes that can be introduced to large-scale production sites. You will work with colleagues from a range of specialities, both in R&D and in manufacturing sites around the world, giving you great exposure to the roles on offer within the company as well as experience in communicating with people from a variety of backgrounds.

Role/Location 5: Stevenage (R&D)

This is a practical role where you will be working in the R&D laboratories alongside chemists and material scientists to generate process understanding that underpins the successful scale-up and commercial industrialisation of GSK’s future manufacturing processes for small molecules. Your focus will be to combine Digital Data and Analytics (DDA) information generated in laboratory studies with your strong knowledge of engineering principles and processes (including simulation/modelling) to develop robust, scalable, sustainable pharmaceutical manufacturing processes. As processes transfer to pilot plant facilities (to support clinical trial delivery) or to manufacturing facilities (as part of commercialisation), you will be required to provide support as the engineering technical expert at these facilities globally.

In this role you will ultimately:

• Design and perform scale up/down experiments in chemical engineering unit operations to develop understanding against fast paced project timelines
• Think creatively to optimise engineering solutions and de-risk scale-up processes.
• Ensure that experimental work is communicated effectively at internal R&D meetings.
• Participate in technology transfer activities as appropriate to GSK manufacturing partners.
• Author or contribute to internal documentation relevant to the role.
• Comply with applicable Data Integrity, Quality, cGMP (current Good Manufacturing Practice) and regulatory requirements in all aspects of work.
• Fully embrace all aspects of safety when working in the laboratory.

What do we offer you?

• Salary of £21,400, plus a bonus
• Access to GSK resources, including employee assistance programmes, private healthcare and well-being programs.
• On-the-job experience, training and development, delivered through a mixture of coaching and mentoring
• A GSK placement which gives you the opportunity to take on a real role with genuine impact
• You will join IPUnite, GSK’s community of over 250 students across all UK sites and business areas, run by the Industrial Placement students committee
• Once you accept your offer you will be invited to join LinkedIn groups and pre-joining webinars, to enable you to connect and network with new students