University

I always knew it was going to happen, but somehow it still surprised me when it did.  In my last year at university, talk turned to graduate jobs, and I realised that I was going to have to make some plans for my career.  Unlike some of my friends, who had spent their summers in internship jobs with a view to getting on a graduate scheme at a big company, I had chosen to travel to far flung corners of the world during my breaks from university, teaching English in Asia and South America.  This left me feeling rather like a blank canvas, which I tried to see as a positive thing, and so I set about trying to think about what kind of jobs might be appropriate for me.

The first thing I did was to go to my university careers service.  The problem with this, though, was that they had plenty of information about how to get a job in your chosen field, if you had decided what that was.   The staff there seemed a little fed up of vague students expecting them to provide answers to all the challenging questions in their lives. It was obvious that I was going to have to do a little more thinking by myself before I could enlist the help of somebody who didn’t know me.

I decided to start looking through all the job adverts printed in newspapers, to get a better idea of opportunities that were available.  Part of my job search involved broadening my outlook to get a better idea of potential career options, beyond the classic graduate scheme jobs and ‘professions’, which I didn’t think were for me.  From scanning a large number of these I managed to get a good idea of the kind of roles that interested me and their requirements.

I could see that the kind of jobs I was interested in were mainly in the charity sector, but most of the jobs advertised stated that applicants needed to have a demonstrable interest in the charity sector and some work experience.  I was concerned that this might be difficult for me to show, so I decided to apply for internship jobs and work experience in the charities that I was interested in.  I was offered a couple of placements at medium sized UK charities.  After working as an assistant at both of these for a few weeks, I was convinced that this was the kind of thing I wanted to be doing. After a few weeks, I had a phone call from somebody I had worked with at one of the charities, saying that there was a vacancy that they would like me to fill. I was pleased that I hadn’t gone for a graduate scheme like most of my friends, and the graduate jobs market had not been quite as much of a nightmare as I had expected!

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Making the transition from university to the world of work can be extremely difficult. First of all, it seems to require students in their final year or recently graduated to know precisely what they want to do in professional life. Some degrees lend themselves in a very straightforward manner to particular career paths: medicine and law are just two examples taken from the academic realm, while vocational courses tend to be even more job-oriented. However, many other degree options are far less suggestive of a particular direction to take after graduation – take history, theology, and philosophy for instance. In one sense, students graduating from the latter kind of humanities subjects have an advantage: they have greater freedom to choose which graduate jobs or graduate scheme they will apply for. In another sense, the humanities students are unfortunate: such is their flexibility that they often find themselves caught up in the complex situation of indecision and internship schemes.

The internship culture has a bad press. In the worst case scenarios, bright young graduates positively bursting with ideas are taken on by a company that exploits them; using them for only the most menial tasks such as archiving press and opening mail. Obviously, these internships are to be avoided. But how do graduates know to steer clear of such bad practices? What they absolutely must remember is to do their research. Careers websites will often provide descriptions and insider reviews of internship programmes and as a rule, the more established the employer, the less likely graduates are to find themselves being used for cheap or free labour.

An even more certain way to avoid exploitation on the job or internship market is to apply for graduate jobs or a graduate scheme offering a competitive starting salary. Careers websites tend to feature a large number of employers from lucrative fields such as law, consultancy, advertising and retail. The better websites will not restrict themselves in such a way though and may offer details of opportunities in publishing, charity, not-for-profit and the public sector. And, if the amount of choice is just too vast and overwhelming, the very best careers sites allow graduates to complete psychometric tests and receive news of recruitment events so that the whole affair becomes more personal.

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