Chris Wickson, who has recently moved to London from his home in Moreton Paddocks, launched website RateMyPlacement.co.uk in March last year with three of his university friends.

The site reviews student work placements and has reached the last 20 nominees for the HSBC Unipreneurs £20,000 business award - beating hundreds of other student entries.

Describing how the idea came about, the 22-year-old said: "We decided to start the website after we finished our placement years and we were talking about whether we would do the same placement again if we had known at the beginning what we knew after completing it.

"We decided there was a lack of information and thought that if people could sit down and talk to someone who had done the placements and so we came up with the idea of the website."

The site, which has 3,000 registered users, aims to help students use their placement wisely by giving information and accounts from others who have already completed them.

At the moment the website is a hobby for the friends, who met at Loughborough University, but they hope to make it their full time job in the future.

The site makes money by selling advertising and profile pages to businesses advertising vacancies and the team believe it has the potential to expand further.

Mr Wickson, who works for a London marketing company, told the Courier: "We are all doing graduate schemes as well but are hoping to work on the website full-time soon.

"We are delighted to be in the top 20 and we should find out if we are through to the final in the next few weeks.

"If we are the ceremony is held at Bafta and it is a Dragons' Den type panel on the stage. Hopefully we'll be there."

For more information visit:

www.RateMyPlacement.co.uk.