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Getting an internship after you graduate May 15, 2012

Posted by Andrew Falconer in : Marketing, Publishing, career profiles, employability and skills , add a comment

Internships have traditionally been targetted at penultimate year students but increasingly graduates are seeing them as a useful means of gaining professional experience. Indeed The Careers Group has a specific internship programme open only to graduates.

At a recent conference for employers, the benefit of having a graduate internship was stressed by Middlesex University alumnus Abdul Ahad who undertook an opportunity with Dennis Publishing. Abdul had already undertaken paid positions in other organisations but decided that he needed a career, not just a job.

In this video Abdul explains to an audience of employers and professionals why he found his graduate internship so valuable.

A love affair with medicine January 29, 2012

Posted by Andrew Falconer in : Medicine and Healthcare, The Careers Group, graduate entry medicine , add a comment

Medical careers are now open to a wider range of people than ever before. Accelerated medical courses are designed specifically to train graduates with a non-medical degree as doctors.

Use Valentine’s Day to your career advantage by taking part in the one-day coursedf exploring graduate entry into medicine.

This course will help you to find out about:

The day will consist of:

Join the course on Facebook, where you’ll receive updates, can take part in discussions, ask them your questions and share the event with your friends and anyone who you think will be interested in applying to the course.

Assessment Centres – Group exercises January 26, 2012

Posted by Andrew Falconer in : employability and skills , add a comment

Continueing our blog posts on assessment centres, group exercises are commonly used by recruiters. They are used to determine how candidates behave in team or group situations.

Typically they will consider:

Not all of these are positive qualities. Companies are looking for team-players as well as leaders; being competitive is good only if it is productive; do you know when you are wrong or when somebody else has a valuable contribution to make?, do you listen? Listening is as much a part of communicating and speaking. Employers look for a range of different qualities in their staff.

Group Exercise

This is usually an assessed discussion with a small number of candidates – usually about 8.  Candidates will receive a short briefing paper and will be asked to come up with a team response to the question posed.

This can also take the form of a case-study where the group is presented with a dossier of information about a client and the group needs to make recommendations about how the company can help the client.

Role Play

Role play is used to place a candidate in a hypothetical situation and see how they respond. Of course the situation is contrived but the closer you get to thinking as a real employee should, the better.

And finally….

Assessment Centres are a key part of the recruitment and selection process. You may not feel confident about them but you can prepare in advance and build your confidence up. The careers centre can help through one-to-one coaching, DVDs and printed materials, skills development workshops and practical advice.  We have even been known to help students understand etiquette and prepare for formal dinners and functions which formed part of their selection process (some Investment Banks and armed services invite candidates to formal dinners). If you feel you are a bit stuck, drop by and see us!

Some resources

Assessment Centres – E-tray January 16, 2012

Posted by Andrew Falconer in : Psychometric and Personality testing, employability and skills , 1 comment so far

We recently posted about assessment centre. There are several exercises that candidates undertake.

E-Tray Exercises

E-tray exercises are timed and they are designed to test your ability for rational thinking under pressure. The usually consist of you receiving information about an issue and you having to determine an outcome. However you may not get all the information at once and, as the test progresses, information comes through faster and more urgently, making the decision making process harder.

You will usually be required to make some basic calculations, extract relevant data and make a judgement. However they often provide you with too much data and try to mislead you with irrelevant information. Some tests require you to formulate a response to a customer or managerial enquiry based only on the relevant information provided.

So what are they looking for? They will be wanting somebody who keeps to the brief and does what is required of them. You should be able to identify the key issues and then justify the decision you make using them. Employers want to see good quality structured writing with appropriate style, spelling and grammar.

E-tray exercises are changing. SHL, one of the leading providers of testing resources for recruiters, have devloped the Fast Track test which is currently being introduced by some employers. For example, Royal Bank of Scotland has adopted a new SHL test called Fast Track. This is a new type of e-tray exercise and a post about this will be published on this blog on Thursday.

You can improve your e-tray performance by using the UK Civil Service Faststream online sample test. Click here. The format of this test is very similar to other companies including the Big Four.

Fast-track

Assessment centres are changing. Some of the exercises that have been used for years are being replaced with newer versions. Companies like SHL and Morrisby have been developing new products to meet the changing needs of their clients, graduate recruiters.

One such product is the Fast Track Exercise currently being used by RBS. There isn’t much information available about these exercises so I thought it would be useful to blog about them. There is limited information available on these test yet but you may want to book-mark the tag on Wikijobs and keep up to date.  Have a look at these candidate reviews of Fast Track tests.

Do you live in West Sussex, East Sussex, Hampshire or Surrey and want a paid internship? December 21, 2011

Posted by Kirsti Burton in : Uncategorized , add a comment

Originally posted at QM Jobs Blog

GraduteOn is an internship programme that is run through the University of Chichester. The programme provides graduates with opportunities for paid internships  across West Sussex and neighbouring areas. These opportunities may range from short-term, expenses only internships within the charity sector to fully-paid internships, in the private and public sector, lasting several months.

GraduateOn offers the opportunity to people from any university who have graduated within the last 3 years to gain graduate-level work experience.  Applicants must be eligible to work in the UK.

For further information see www.graduateon.net

Roles in publishing – video profiles March 14, 2011

Posted by TCG Info in : Media , add a comment

You know how it is, you click on one link on Youtube and before you know it you’ve lost an hour watching the related videos… Well from looking at one video on publishing careers, I found a whole array of job profile videos, many for early career roles, that give a nice introduction to what the roles involve.

(And for more details about these kinds of jobs in publishing, make sure you read the Skillset and Prospects written profiles too)

Bloomsbury Publishing

Pearson

Penguin

Random House (International)

Bertelsmann (Germany)

Videos in English

New careers guide for final year students October 22, 2010

Posted by TCG Info in : Uncategorized , add a comment

Click on the image for PDF

The Finalist Directory is a handy all-in-one careers guide for any student in their final year. It contains advice on:

It also has listings of upcoming employer presentations in London, and graduate schemes that are currently recruiting. Looking at these opportunities, some of them are closing quite soon in November, and others are ‘rolling’ so they will take applications until places are filled (which might be sooner than you think) so my top tip is apply now, don’t wait for the closing dates!

And check out that cover design by competition winner Karina Filonenko.

The idea was to visualize the theme of guide as a helper. This guide answers questions that are asked by students when they’re choosing their own way in future career path, postgraduate education.

Well done Karina!

Show me the money! October 20, 2010

Posted by Helen Curry in : Uncategorized , 4comments

Image by stevendepolo (Flickr)

Money isn’t everything, right? But when you have student debts and big plans for your future life, you need to know how that graduate job is likely to pan out. So how do you find the figures?

The most useful, quickly accessed source is Prospects. You can look up the jobs you are considering and see the Salary and Conditions link for details of average starting salaries, alongside an idea of what you can earn in the longer-term with experience. Mm £35,000 – £50,000 starting salary for a financial trader? No surprises there then…

If you haven’t yet settled on a career choice and are curious about what people from your particular course went on to do, you can request that information from your university – try your course administrator or careers service. UK universities all must gather Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education (DLHE) data on the employment of their graduates 6 months after graduation, so they should be able to provide you with some anonymised figures (graduates’ identities are carefully protected).

If you have chosen a career or two to research, for more specific details of salaries look to the relevant professional bodies as they often gather information on the salaries of their members. For example CILIP, the organisation for librarians, gives salary guidelines for information professionals by a range of sectors as well as years of experience. Not all organisations will put this information on their website, but they may still have a report they can send you if you drop them an email. See this listing to identify relevant professional associations.

And if you are up for a bit of research, a great way to get a more accurate impression of what you will earn is by looking at job ads in the sector, location and roles that appeal. Even if you are not there yet, you can estimate how long it might take you to get the requisite experience and qualifications. Find sector-specific and professional online jobs boards here.

Finally, for very general figures you might try the Office for National Statistics Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) – 2009 Results. They can give you an overview of average salaries in different sectors and different regions, broken down by full-time and part-time workers, male and female. The main disadvantage however, apart from the basic presentation, is the lack of distinction between graduates and non-graduates, and a lack of breakdown by age for sector-specific information. Still you might be interested to find that:

The average UK salary for 22-29 year-olds is £20,962.

For men aged 22-29: £23,460

For women aged 22-29: £18,508

And then there are a host of other more specialised sources – got any useful tips to share?

So I got my PhD, but I want to do something different… August 23, 2010

Posted by Helen Curry in : postgraduate , 3comments

Image by clevercupcakes

It is a common enough situation to want a change, particularly after the stress of finishing that PhD dissertation, but where do you go from there?

I recommend treating this as your next research project. Think about the methods you can apply to find the information you need – from resoures, people and advice – can you apply those research methods here too? In that vein, here’s a reading list…

Websites

Vitae is an essential place to start as they have heaps of information and resources, including help if it is worries about family, age or disability that you feel are restricting your academic options. And if you are looking for career ideas, take a look at these reports to see what others in your position did next – What do researchers do 2009.

Book cover for the "How to write a CV" guideFrom our own website, The Careers Group, download these specialised information sheets on CVs and careers for PhDs. See also our general CV guide How to write a CV (pdf) which actually has an example of a CV from a post-doc moving our of academia, p.34.

For a real-life stories of career choices following your research degree, Beyond the PhD is fantastic for getting perspective.

If you are a science researcher, I really recommend the QM researchers blog - the opportunities posted there are open to all and cover a range of career ideas relevant to your expertise. There are also some good lists of links.

And another blog worth trying is Leaving Academia, giving peoples’ experiences of changing paths.

Books

Two titles spring to mind right away – both broad in scope and good for exploring your choices and motivations, as well as how to proceed.

What else you can do with a Ph.D. - Jan Secrist & Jacqueline Fitzpatrick, Sage Publications

I like this one for the depth of information and analysis – it is written well for its audience. It is particularly useful for analysing your skills and work personality – essential when you are applying to non-academic jobs. The book also covers job applications, interview skills, negotiation and evaluating job offers – it leads you through the whole process.

“So what are you going to do with that?” - Susan Basalla & Maggie Debelius,  Chicago University Press

This book is a little less thorough, but its strength is in the career choice section. It is very helpful if you are unsure of whether leaving academia is the right choice, and where to go next. In particular the examples in chapter 2 from PhD students who went into a variety of careers makes for interesting reading.

***

Does anyone have any other resources they’d recommend, or experiences to share?

Design Competition: Design the new front cover for the Finalist Directory May 25, 2010

Posted by TCG Info in : The Careers Group , 4comments

Last year's winning cover, by Moira Gil and Sonsoles Alvarez from the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London

The Careers Group, University of London is holding a competition to design the new front cover for our annual publication, The Finalist Directory. We are looking for something new and exciting that will stand out and attract the right audience.

The Finalist Directory is distributed to University of London College Careers Services in September each year and has a shelf life of approximately 6 months. The content includes several careers related articles, an A-Z listing of employment opportunities, an A-Z listing of postgraduate study opportunities and careers event listings.

Producing a winning design for the front cover would be an ideal addition to your portfolio and also ensure exposure of your design to a range of employers, as well as approximately 12,000 finalists from the following colleges: Goldsmiths, King’s College, Queen Mary, Royal Holloway, School of Oriental & African Studies, Specialist University of London Institutes & Colleges, St. Mary’s College and University College London. The winning designer will be acknowledged at the beginning of the publication.

Requirements:
•    Size – A4, portrait
•    Title – The Finalist Directory 2009 / 2010
•    Tag line – The essential guide for graduate opportunities and postgraduate study options.
•    Logo – The Careers Group logo should be in the bottom right hand corner
•    Colour – full colour
How to enter: Email cs@careers.lon.ac.uk to initially express your interest and we will send you a copy of The Careers Group logos and our brand requirements. Then send your design in high resolution pdf format by Friday 16 July at 5pm. Please remember to include your name and contact details, as well as a short paragraph explaining the ideas behind your design.

If you need any further information please email us at the address above.

Find out more about The Careers Group: www.careers.lon.ac.uk
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