Writing Your Thesis at a Company: Here's How to Make It Work

Your topic is agreed, the company has said yes and you are looking forward to real data instead of another literature review. Then you spend three weeks waiting for permission to send out your first staff survey, because nobody in the business can say who is allowed to approve it.

You write your thesis at a company by checking your programme regulations first, securing one supervisor at university and one at the firm, putting the use of internal data in writing, and getting your survey signed off by management, HR and the data protection lead before you send a single invitation. We will walk you through the timeline, the embargo rules and the part most guides skip: how you actually get usable data inside a business.

📌 The key points

• UK undergraduate and taught master's projects are dissertations, not theses.
• A thesis embargo usually runs 12 months, rarely beyond five years.
• A short UK course placement carries no minimum wage entitlement.
• The National Living Wage is £12.71 an hour from April 2026.
• Britain has no works council, so HR and management decide.

What a company-based dissertation actually is

A company-based dissertation is a final project written in partnership with a business: the topic comes from a real operational problem, the data comes from the firm, and the mark still comes from your university alone. The company has an interest in the outcome but no say in your grade.

UK terminology trips people up here, so it is worth being precise. In British universities an undergraduate final project and a taught master's project are both called a dissertation, while thesis is normally reserved for doctoral work. American usage is the other way round, which is why job adverts and software written for a US audience sometimes say the opposite. If your handbook says dissertation, that is the word to use in your paperwork.

The company arrangement itself has several names. A structured year in industry is a placement year or sandwich year, often taken between the second and third year of an undergraduate degree, and some courses are advertised in sandwich mode for exactly that reason. A shorter arrangement is usually just an internship or a work placement, and those terms carry no legal status of their own.

Work out whether your project needs primary data at all before you commit. The difference between an empirical and a theoretical dissertation decides how much access to the business you really need, and how your own data fits into a method chapter is covered in the overview of empirical research. If your level is already settled, two guides go deeper: one on the bachelor's dissertation at a company and one on the master's dissertation at a company.

The timeline of a company-based dissertation in six stages

A company-based dissertation starts roughly a term before you register your topic and runs through six stages, the first three of which are purely administrative. Compressing them costs you writing time at the far end, because approvals and contracts cannot run in parallel.

Allow more time than feels comfortable. Several weeks usually pass between your first conversation with the business and the day you are allowed to ask your first question, and none of those weeks counts towards your submission deadline.

1. Read the programme handbook. Does your course allow a project based at an external organisation, and does it need approval from the module leader or the examination board? Both are set out in the handbook.
2. Secure your academic supervisor. Your supervisor has to agree to the project before you commit to the company. Some departments will not supervise work that carries a confidentiality restriction.
3. Turn the brief into a research question. The firm's operational problem has to become a research question that stands up academically. That translation is your job, not the company's.
4. Get the agreement in writing. Pay, hours, data access, confidentiality and publication all belong in a written agreement before you start.
5. Get the survey signed off. Management, HR and the data protection lead say yes before the first invitation goes out.
6. Write, submit, defend. Before your viva or presentation, agree who from the company will attend and which figures may be shown.

💡 Tip

After stage three, get both supervisors on one call and write five lines afterwards: topic, method, data access, dates, publication. Send that note to both of them. It costs ten minutes and it is what you fall back on when expectations drift apart in month four.

Two supervisors, two sets of expectations: how to defuse the conflict

A company-based project gives you two points of contact with different goals: your academic supervisor judges the quality of the research, your workplace contact wants something the business can use. The mark comes from the university alone, and the company has no influence over it.

Most of the time this works. It gets uncomfortable at exactly one point, and that point arrives earlier than most students expect: when your findings are not what the business hoped for. A suggestion to trim a chapter, smooth a figure or phrase something a little more positively sounds harmless, and it is the moment your research loses its value.

A company may remove its trade secrets. It may not remove your findings.

In practice you solve this through presentation rather than argument. Company names, sites, revenue figures and product names can all be anonymised without losing a single finding: the Manchester plant becomes Site A, absolute revenue becomes an index. That is what anonymisation is for, and it often removes the need for an embargo altogether.

If the objection is about substance rather than confidentiality, tell your academic supervisor straight away and put it in writing. A dissertation that reports an inconvenient result, explains it and places it in context marks better than one that confirms what the business already believed.

Thesis embargo and restricted access: what UK universities allow

An embargo delays publication of your dissertation in the university's open access repository for a fixed period, so that commercially confidential material stays out of the public domain. Restriction goes further at some institutions and hides the record itself, including title and abstract.

Length is the part worth planning around. The University of Sheffield states that the maximum embargo is usually 12 months, that anything longer needs faculty approval with a written rationale, and that embargoes beyond five years will not normally be approved. Where a sponsor contract imposes the restriction, Sheffield asks for a copy of that contract.

Nottingham splits the two instruments explicitly. A restriction, which makes nothing discoverable at all, is granted for no more than two years in the first instance and can be extended to a maximum of five, and it is normally reserved for genuine confidentiality such as a pending patent application. An embargo, where the bibliographic details stay visible, is usually one to two years and you request it yourself when you deposit the file.

⚠️ Warning

Agree the embargo with your supervisor before you start writing, not at deposit. Some departments will not supervise a restricted project at all, and finding that out four weeks before submission leaves you choosing between a new supervisor and a new topic. Anonymising the company usually solves the same problem without any paperwork.

An embargo does not stop your work being marked. Your supervisor, the second marker and the examination board all read the full text, and the university keeps its copy. Your own institution's regulations are what count here, so check the programme handbook. This guide is not a substitute for that advice.

Collecting data inside a company: the part almost nobody explains

A survey inside a business needs sign-off before the first invitation goes out, and it usually needs it from three places: your workplace contact or a senior manager, HR, and whoever owns data protection. Miss one and the survey gets stopped, often halfway through fieldwork.

Missing approvals are the most common reason company-based projects run late. Most guides on the subject cover applications and contracts in detail and stop exactly where the research begins. So here are the three hurdles in order.

Who signs off a staff survey in a UK company

Britain has no works council that exists by default, which makes the approval route less formal than in Germany or Austria and harder to pin down. The nearest statutory mechanism is the Information and Consultation of Employees Regulations 2004, and they only bite in undertakings with at least 50 employees, only after a valid employee request, and only on a closed list of subjects: the economic situation, the employment situation, and decisions likely to cause substantial changes to work organisation or contracts. A student survey is not on that list.

In practice, then, your gatekeepers are people rather than a committee. Approach HR first, bring the complete questionnaire, and explain how anonymity is produced technically. Where a trade union is recognised, ask whether the recognition agreement says anything about surveying members, because that is a contractual question rather than a statutory one. And expect one more request that catches students out: many organisations want to see the invitation text before it is sent, not just the questions.

Data protection and anonymity: what changes inside a business

Staff data in the UK sits under the UK GDPR together with the Data Protection Act 2018, supervised by the Information Commissioner's Office. The ICO publishes detailed employment guidance on monitoring workers, which is about surveillance rather than surveys but sets out the standard the organisation is measured against for anything it does with worker data.

For a student project the way out of this is simpler than it sounds. If no personal data is collected in the first place, the UK GDPR does not apply to those answers at all. A genuinely anonymous survey is therefore not just the more considerate option but the legally quieter one. What to check technically is covered in the guide to data protection in surveys. This section is not legal advice, and your company's data protection lead is the right person to confirm it.

Small teams: when demographic questions identify the person

A survey is only anonymous when nobody can be identified indirectly either. In a business with 3,000 staff, asking for department, age band and length of service is harmless. In a team of eight, those same three answers are a unique fingerprint, and everyone in the room knows it. Response rates then collapse not because the topic is sensitive but because the attribution is obvious.

Two rules deal with this reliably. Ask for demographic details only where your analysis genuinely needs them, and band them generously: three age groups rather than year of birth, three business areas rather than nine departments. Then say plainly in the invitation what is stored and what is not, instead of simply asserting the word anonymous. How a workplace survey is set up end to end is covered in the guide to employee surveys.

Response rates and sample size: how many answers to expect

Your sample in a company-based project is almost always capped by the size of the workforce, and that limitation belongs in your method chapter rather than being glossed over. Inviting everyone at one site is not random sampling: it is a census with self-selection at the response stage.

No honest guide can promise you a response rate, because it depends on the size of the business, the topic and how visibly management backs it. So work backwards instead of trusting a number from a blog: how many completed questionnaires does your analysis need as a minimum, and how many people must you invite to get there? What sample size your chosen method requires is a question for before the invitation, not after.

Five things lift response rates inside a business noticeably, and none of them costs anything:

• The invitation visibly comes from a senior manager, participation stays voluntary.
• Completing it during working hours is allowed, confirmed in writing.
• The survey takes under ten minutes and says so upfront.
• One single reminder after a week, not three.
• Results go back to staff, with a stated date.

Reporting the results back is the strongest of the five and the one most often forgotten. Anyone who has filled in a workplace survey and never seen an outcome will not bother next time. It is also worth checking what makes a study representative before you write your conclusions: your findings may represent the business you studied, but they do not represent the sector.

Pay, hours and the written agreement: what to settle before you start

Pay for a company-based dissertation usually comes through a placement, an internship or a part-time contract. The amount depends on hours, sector and region, and no guide can quote you a realistic figure for your case.

The floor is worth knowing precisely, because one exception applies directly to you. From April 2026 the National Living Wage is £12.71 an hour for workers aged 21 and over, with £10.85 for 18 to 20 year olds and £8.00 for under-18s and apprentices. However, GOV.UK is explicit that students required to do an internship of less than one year as part of a UK further or higher education course are not entitled to the minimum wage. A placement that forms part of your degree can therefore lawfully be unpaid, and whether you are owed the minimum wage turns on your employment status rather than on the label the company uses.

Five points belong in the agreement or a written side letter:

Data access is the most important line and the one most often left vague. A verbal promise that you will get the figures is worthless the moment your contact leaves the company or moves to another project. Write down which report, which period and which named person you are relying on.

Common mistakes in a company-based dissertation

Most problems come from timing and permissions rather than from weak research. Knowing the following four mistakes saves you weeks at the end of the project.

What they have in common is that all four happen during preparation and none of them during writing. Once fieldwork has started, almost none of them can still be fixed.

The survey goes out before it has been signed off

The classic version: the questionnaire is ready, your contact tells you to just send it round, and HR hears about it from the intranet. Fieldwork gets stopped part way through and the responses already collected are usually unusable afterwards. Get the approval in writing, even if it is only a short email.

The research question is really the company's question

How do we increase satisfaction in the sales team? That is a project brief, not a research question. A dissertation needs a question that a method can answer and that connects to existing literature. Reframe it as a question about the relationship between management behaviour and satisfaction and the business still gets its answer.

The plan ignores the waiting

Approval, agreement, sign-off and fieldwork together easily take two months before any analysis is possible. Counting your submission deadline from registration loses you that time twice over. Put the waiting periods into your plan as blocks of their own, and register the project only once the survey has been approved.

Internal documents get cited like published literature

An internal slide deck is not a published source and nobody outside the company can verify it. Cite it as unpublished material with a title, a year and a note that it is held by the organisation, and make it available to your supervisor on request. How to fit a survey into the structure of your work is covered in the guide to running a survey for a bachelor's or master's dissertation.

Conclusion

A company-based dissertation rarely fails on the topic and almost always fails on the organisation around it. Settle your supervisor, the embargo and the survey approval before you commit to a submission date, and put every promise in writing. Securing access to the data contractually means the hardest part is behind you before you write the first sentence.

Where to go next

• Planning the empirical work behind it? Empirical bachelor's or master's dissertation
• Need respondents beyond the company? Finding survey participants
• Want the whole research process in order? The empirical research process

Need a staff survey that HR will approve without a second meeting?

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