Careers Advisory
The Undergraduate Careers Advisory Service
Terry Jones, Careers Adviser, King's College London Careers Service
with thanks to
Margaret Dane, Chief Executive, Association of Careers Advisory Services
Every year in May, just after the end of final exams, our office receives a visit. The identity of the visitor changes year on year but the substance of the visit is always the same: "I have just finished finals and I would like some help in getting a graduate job."
The term we Careers Advisers use for this type of query is - Too little too late. A student at this stage should surely have a much clearer idea of what finding a job after a degree is all about. Or are we merely being naive?
However if a student in a college or a sixth form poses this same question then he or she is well ahead of the game. Putting some thoughts about the kind of career you want before you start your degree has got to make sense.
The early planner needs to get used to a few ideas. What is a graduate job, for instance, and what sort of help can you get in selecting one, obtaining one and making a success of it?
Graduate
What is a graduate? The term in the UK has always carried a sort of cachet. A graduate was a rare breed in the 1960s and 70s. Nowadays with 40% of school leavers (with a projected rise to 50% according to current government policy) doing some form of Higher Education, rarity is no longer something that can be claimed.
As the proportion of graduates in the population has risen then some Universities have tried to define what qualities a graduate has or should be expected to have. They evidently felt that it could no longer be taken for granted.
Although you might think that this should be simple task, it turns out to be quite tricky. Has a graduate in Sculpture got the same set of skills as a graduate in Finance? It does not seem likely. Perhaps they are different skills but at the same level. Possibly, although you might need to define what you mean by "level".
There do seem to be some common elements in descriptions of graduate skills
Analytical ability:
Graduates are able to break down a complex problem into its component parts and devise solutions
Communication:
Graduates can present ideas to other people; they can write, contribute to debates and discussions.
Teams:
Graduates can collaborate with others. They can take on different roles depending on the requirements of a situation or task and work towards a common goal.
Knowledge:
Graduates can acquire knowledge. The key element here is that with a firm foundation of knowledge in a particular discipline, they can apply that knowledge in a given situation and continually refine, improve, extend or up-date the knowledge.
Other elements that sometimes find their way into these lists of "graduateness" include the ability to make ethical judgments or take appropriate actions in a given context.
If some Universities have been trying to produce definitions of the graduates they want to produce then some firms have been trying to produce definition of the graduates they seek to employ. Intellectual ability, team skills, communication skills feature prominently there too. Added to this they usually put leadership.
The point about leadership is that for many employers graduates are seen as potential managers or at least as professional leaders.
Graduate Jobs
What many people call "graduate jobs" are not really jobs at all. They are really intensive training programmes carried on in a real work situation. They are often called "Fast-track" "Fast Stream", "Graduate Development Programme". It is actually only a minority of graduates who get into these schemes. Entry on to them is usually preceded by a lengthy series of assessments interviews and tests. The employers are often very explicit about wanting to get the "cream" of the crop.
Teachers are graduates, as are most nurses. Pharmacists are graduates as well as all of those therapists and scientists who work in the NHS. Oddly though, these professions are often not included in public debates about graduate jobs.
So you cannot walk in to an office and pick up a graduate job. You need to build up to one, or perhaps - to change the metaphor - to grow into one. Here is how your University Careers Service might help you do it.
The Careers service
Early on in your course - well before exams loom - try to find out about opportunities to get involved with your department, your university and the wider community. Careers Services are a good source for ideas they may have a special bulletin board or may simply provide a booklet of good contacts. At this stage relevance to your chosen career is not the priority. It is all about expanding your horizons and learning to make an individual contribution
In the second year of your course where most will pass the half-way stage then focusing on a specific career area begins to merit serious attention. But how do you choose?
Not easy for most people, but the first problem is how d you know what there is to choose from? What is out there?
Of course, that's a big subject. What would a student do when faced with a big subject? Research of course. You go and find out. A trip to the Career Service will introduce you to the sources of information - books, magazines, directories, leaflets, postcards, fliers, and websites. You review the literature; you map the terrain.
Sometimes an area will seize the attention and so you begin to deepen your knowledge with a more intensive search. Sometimes it won't come so easily.
The problem for many students lies not so much in knowledge of jobs but in knowledge of themselves. What am I like? What are my strengths and abilities? What are my aspirations? The answer that was appropriate for job knowledge is less relevant here. How can you research yourself? Where are the sources of data?
Self-knowledge is the Holy Grail of Career Guidance. But, how do you find out what you are like? Here are some common sources:
Actions
What do I choose to do? That must give an insight into my preferences values and skills
Feedback
What feedback do I get? What do others say about me- formally and informally?
Reflection
What do I think I am like?
It is often useful to correlate these 3 sources. Do they corroborate or contradict each other?
If all this seems too difficult there are a few devices to be found at the Careers Service which may trigger the process
Prospects Planner This is a piece of software devised in conjunction with the major partner and collaborator of University Careers Services, Graduate Prospects. It is available on computers in the Careers service and there is a version on the Prospects website. (www.prospects.ac.uk) It consists of a series of questions on your skills, interests and values the answers to which are matched to a database of occupations. The programme can generate a list of occupations which match your own assessment of yourself and in this way your research of occupations can be whittled down to areas which have the potential to suit you.
Personality Tests: Most Careers Services are able to offer reputable, validated tests. The purpose is to identify characteristic ways of thinking feeling and behaving which could make some occupations more suitable than others.
The summer vacation of the second year of a 3 year course is increasingly seen as a crucial one, particularly by those students with serious career ambitions. Many employers offer internships of varying kinds that will offer a real taste of organizations, their work and their culture. For employers it is an excellent way of spotting talent that will be on he job market in 12 months time. For students too it constitutes a "try before you buy". "Internships" so called are characteristic of larger employers. Work experience with smaller organizations is just as valuable. One well established national programme - Step specialises in placing undergraduates in small companies on exciting projects, and there is a National Centre for Work Experience which is part of Graduate Prospects which was mentioned earlier that promotes placements right across the UK. The Jobs/Placements section of the Everything You Wanted to Know guide lists many of these organisations.
The first term of the final year is often the point where the greatest numbers of students make their first acquaintance with the careers Team. There is in most Universities a busy careers Programme, presentations by prominent companies, an array of recruitment directories and magazines posters and pamphlets. Many career publishers hire student brand agents to pepper notice boards and walls with literature promoting this or that recruitment website. Career service waiting rooms are jammed with students wanting someone to evaluate their application form, their CV or their covering letter. As the academic year progresses, the lucky few come back to hone their interview techniques or prepare for their psychometric selection tests.
And then as the academic year rolls on and final assessments loom ever larger, third year students carry a lean and hunted look - many halt their job-hunting to make sure of securing a good degree.
Which takes us to May when a final year student who has not done any of the above calls in to our office.
Does it matter that this student has left it so late? Well it matters if a career is important to the student. If on the other hand a career is not on his/her agenda, if it is the last thing on the "to do" list, if it is not significant enough to make plans for then it does not matter. They will get a job of a sort. But not a graduate job in all likelihood.
The point for the student beginning a course I think is that your careers does not lie ahead of you in the future, it is with you now in the choices you make or fail to make, in the actions you take or fail to take.
Will it be worth it?
There are a number of ideas which are currently being publicly debated about the value of degrees. The ideas are contradictory and fragmented and not likely to provide easy reassurance to the student considering a degree.
One idea - promoted by the government - is that graduates will earn significantly more than non-graduates in their working lifetime. They will incur debts but these will be more than repaid when they reap the benefits of their competitive advantage in the job market.
Another view is that the number of jobs offering significant advantage over non-graduates is limited. This number will not expand to accommodate the expanding numbers of graduates. The impact of this will be that large numbers of graduates will be left doing poorly rewarded work that does not require a degree.
A third view has emerged based on a long-term study of graduates careers. In this view graduates move more slowly but very definitely towards career satisfaction and financial reward. This view seems to suggest that the benefits of Higher Education affect graduates long after they have completed their studies. In fact "completed studies" is certainly the wrong phrase, since a characteristic of the graduate in the labour market is the way that learning, in formal and informal senses, never stops.
Clearing
The fact of the matter is that doing a degree is currently the best way of investing in your own development as an individual and as a citizen. It is so important that it needs to be considered very carefully. Of course the annual rush to find courses in the maelstrom that we call the University Clearing system is not conducive to such careful thinking. In any case your thinking ought to include not just the course and the institution but how are you going to manage your time.
You are going to need to achieve good academic results AND put together an impressive array of non-academic achievements. No one said it was going to be easy.
In many years of careers advising I have literally never met anyone who regretted doing their degree. But regrets about not doing more career preparation during their degree? I have met all too many of those.
Read On
Staying in touch with the world
Edward Lucas of The Economist
Quality newspapers are useful for more than the job adverts.
Formal qualifications matter less and less as a good guide to the qualities employers need: the brains and personality, the skills and knowledge, that make a contribution in the workplace to match the cost incurred.
Any job that engages your brain requires a good mental toolkit, compiled both inside education and from real life. If you’ve got a clear idea of the way the world works-in business, politics, culture and society-you’ll be better placed to separate the hard fact from the dodgy assertion, and the solid argument from hot air.
A good feel for the way the world works also makes you more useful to your employer because you understand the business environment better. Every workplace is part of the real world: every job in the country is there only because customers, taxpayers or donors have chosen to send their money in that direction. Where do your organisation’s sales come from? What will affect them in the months and years to come? How will new technology cut your costs - and those of your competitors? What’s happening to jobs like this in other countries? People who think about these things are marked down for promotion. Those who don’t risk a dull job, or none at all.
You can pick up a lot from your formal studies, and from friends. But there’s no substitute for a regular diet of high-quality news to widen your mental horizons. If your idea of current affairs is the sleaze and sex covered by the trashy tabloids, it doesn’t say much for the rest the contents of your skull.
Any public-sector job will be affected, for example, by the debate now ranging about efficiency and productivity in public services. Any private-sector company will need to think about interest rates and state regulation. If you want to work in the voluntary sector, then understanding the way government policy is made and changed is crucial.
Test your general knowledge for a moment: Which is Britain biggest and most successful supermarket chain and why? How does one company take over another? What’s the evidence that the housing market is heading for a crash? Which public services have improved most under this government, which have declined, and why? Is Europe really less successful economically than America? Do speed cameras save lives? Who apart from the government can get a law through parliament?
Some of these have more than one answer; others are matters of opinion. But all of them reflect vital general knowledge- and thus a hunger for facts and ideas that gladdens the heart of a modern employer. If you find that quick quiz difficult, it’s certainly time to improve the intellectual nutrition you are receiving.
It can seem intimidating: the serious newspapers can look huge to first-time buyers. There are millions of words on the newsstand every day, many of them pretty dull. And how can one decide what to read, when the choice is so wide?
Here are ten tips
- Learn to speed-read the newspapers. Don’t spend equal time on every article- there are more words in a daily paper than a full-length novel. Read the first three paragraphs to see what the story is about, and the last two to see if there is some denial or qualification that reduces the story’s importance.
- Be ruthless. Once you’ve gutted an article, don’t come back to it. Set yourself a deadline: 15 minutes to read a daily paper, or 30 for a Saturday or Sunday one. Then throw them in the recycling box.
- Prioritise: ignore all the sport and showbiz, and particularly anything about celebrities. Concentrate on a particular subject- the economy, for example- until you feel you have got to grips with it. Then move on to something else.
- Daily papers are expensive and time-consuming to read. Form a group with friends where you each buy one and swap them round. Discuss your impressions. Work out the days on which particular papers are best- the Saturday Times for example is better than the weekday equivalent. The Guardian's science section on Thursdays is very good. At the beginning, it’s better to switch between papers every day or every week until you get an idea of what suits you.
- Sunday papers can be a time-gobbler. But if you have missed your daily papers, they can be a good way of catching up on the week’s news. Speed-reading is crucial, so learn to find the bits you like- and chuck the rest away.
- Magazines like the Spectator, New Statesman and Prospect give a more opinionated take on the week’s news.
- Try buying a foreign paper occasionally. The Wall St Journal is on sale throughout the UK, as is the International Herald Tribune. If you’ve never read the main American magazines, like the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly or Vanity Fair, you should try them at least once. Note the difference between the sensationalist and unsourced style of much of the British press, and the painstakingly conscientious (but sometimes dull and cheesy) transatlantic approach.
- Every now and again, read a local newspaper. For many employers, that’s the paper that most matters: the one that their customers or clients are most likely to read.
- Try reading things that you don’t agree with. If you’re anti-war and pro-Greenpeace, try reading a right-wing, free-market paper or magazine. If you are a strong right-winger, force yourself to read the Guardian or New Statesman.
- Finally, try reading The Economist. Our British readers make up about one in seven of our international circulation of a million. Many of them find that they don’t need to read anything else. We have more foreign correspondents than any mainstream British paper, so if you’re interested in the world outside this country, we are unbeatable. Our articles are short and snappily written. Last but not least, everything’s fact-checked.
Check out these websites:
- www.economist.com
- www.thescotsman.co.uk
- www.telegraph.co.uk
- www.timesonline.co.uk
- www.independent.co.uk
A Good Read
Have I Got News for You
Donald MacLeod
Education Editor, The Guardian
John's parents were a little surprised to get a phone call from their beloved son the day after they had left him at college with emotional farewells to start student life. Where could he buy a newspaper? he asked. Of course it's easier to ask for advice about something practical - anything at all - than confess to a twinge of homesickness when you're meant to be a grown-up, independent student - but in fact John was showing a good grasp of priorities.
Developing a regular newspaper habit along with all the other dubious habits freshers pick up could be an excellent investment (especially as many papers offer student discounts - the Guardian, for instance, is only 20p on campus) both for your time at university and getting that job at the end of the day to pay off your student debts.
For media studies, a working knowledge of the press is obviously basic (along with the Guardian's media supplement on a Monday) though I am often surprised at the number of would-be journalists who don't seem to read the papers.
Politics, it goes without saying, is another subject you can't seriously tackle without an idea of what's going on and historians often find the present sheds light on the past - journalism is supposed to be the first draft of history, though we know what happens to first drafts.
And who says your newspapers have to be in English? For anyone studying a language a country's newspapers are not only an insight into Italian/Spanish/Arabic as she is spoken but also a glimpse into their culture and concerns.
But even science (see for instance the Telegraph's excellent science page) is getting more of a look-in in the press these days and whatever you end up doing with your science degree, you will have to deal with the ethical and social issues that arise from scientific discoveries and processes. Gone are the days when chemists, say, were allowed to be brilliant and inarticulate - now employers want scientists who can communicate.
Ah yes, employers. At the moment paid employment may be nothing more than a stint behind a bar - though even there up-to-date knowledge of the football scores and showbiz scandal may be useful - but filling in the CV and going for interviews will come round before you know it. And an employer will want someone with some awareness of the world outside the Ivory Tower - even if they don't believe everything they read in the newspapers.
