At the same time of offering candidates as they go, firms are mindful they have future talent pipelines to utilise and that there could be as good or even better talent in that pipeline too. They don’t want to potentially lose that talent as well, and so they won’t offer all their TC spaces to earlier vac schemers.
So doing a later vacation scheme is not going to put you at a disadvantage. Firms generally are not going to run too many vac schemes with too many places if they can easily convert them to TCs too, so it’s just highly unlikely that by the time their Spring VS concludes they have filled all their TC places and can’t offer any to their summer vacation scheme students.
When looking at whether to apply for a vacation scheme or a direct training contract, I use a crude but basic calculation to give you an estimate of how many direct TCs are likely to be there.
Vacation scheme places total numbers across an academic year x 75% = X
X x 75% = Y
Y - Total number of TC places = estimated number of likely direct TC spots available
The above is a basic calculation for all firms though. For some firms the offer % (the first stage of the calculation) is much lower. For firms that recruit competitive talent, their acceptance rate (the second part of the calculation) can be much lower too. But it gives you some idea to work from.
Alternatively look out for stats such as the percentage of trainees who did a vacation scheme with the firm. These stats are sometimes of Chambers Student Guide profiles.
