TARGETjobs News roundup

Hello all, it’s finally Friday. This can only mean one thing; it’s time to update you with a brief summary of the latest news and career advice we wrote on our site this week.

But before we get started I want to draw your attention to Alan Radbourne, a 2013 Loughborough University graduate who has embarked on a year challenge: My OnePound Challenge. The aim of this challenge is to see how much can be made in a year with an initial £1 initial investment.

All profits made are reinvested and used to build a chain of small start ups. This has caught our eyes so much that we are going to be following him on his journey and every week update you on his profits and recent projects. Want to get up to speed? Check out his videos or follow on Twitter @Pound_Challenge or Facebook: One Pound Challenge

Back to business as usual:

This week we revealed which graduate careers are hotspots for jobs growth. If you are graduating in a few years or even this year, it’s worth checking these industries out, see if they are of interest and match your experience or skills accordingly. 

In sector-specific news, we told you:

·         Which retail graduate employers accept graduates with a 2.2

·         Why your computer science degree won’t get you an IT job – beware there is more you need to do to be employable. 

·         And in law we spent five minutes with Fiona Medlock, graduate recruitment manager at Mills & Reeve. She advises you on how to turn a good training contract application into an excellent one. She also has some encouraging words including:

“I read application forms from students who don’t have a 2.1 degree and 300 UCAS points – but they have to shine somewhere on the rest of the form if they are expecting a 2.2” 

Speaking of helpful advice, if you are thinking of applying to the 2014 Undergraduate of the Year awards, make sure you have a read the 2013s winner and finalists blogs. They provide insightful tips on how best to apply and get yourselves prepared.  The Undergraduate of the Year awards give you a chance to win internships in a sector of your choice, to add something impressive to your CV and to network with recruiters. They’re well worth checking out – even if we do say so ourselves.

If you want to learn even more about what it’s like after you win an Undergraduate of the Year award, follow Ella’s blog. Ella is the winner of the Female Undergraduate of the Year award and every week she writes a blog on what she is learning and doing on her internship with Rolls-Royce (part of her prize for winning) 

As always, I leave you with the latest graduate job deadlines closing soon. It’s now or never... so get applying! 

Hope you all have a lovely weekend and slap on the sunscreen; it’s meant to be a scorcher! 

I've graduated: what next?

Our intern Hollie has just graduated - congratulations! So what next? She is here to tell you. 
I graduated last week: robes were worn, champagne was drunk, tears were shed and scrolls were tossed ceremoniously in the air. I have to admit that I’m probably more proud of myself for not falling over on stage than for actually getting a degree, but unfortunately I’ve been advised against putting that under ‘achievements’ on my CV. Oh well.

Now that I have to reluctantly relinquish all ties to studenthood I’m back to giving some serious thought to what to do with, well, the rest of my life. The question I used to be bombarded with (‘so what are you going to do when you graduate?’) has now grotesquely mutated into an equally frightening apparition: ‘what are you doing now you’ve graduated?’

I’ve always envied people who’ve known what they want to do from the start, who’ve gone out and got the relevant experience they need and maybe even done internships with the company that they want to work with when they’re older. Alas life’s not always like that, and like me, most people leave uni without a clue about what they want to do. Personally I have enough trouble deciding what to eat for breakfast every day, let alone what I want to do for a living after I’ve finished my internship here.

My degree was in English literature and mathematics so at the moment I’m not faced with the most glaringly obvious career path. As you’ll have gathered from my last post, I don’t want to get involved with finance, and I’ve discovered that I potentially have the option to go into law, IT, management, retail, media, marketing, teaching – not to mention all the kinds of jobs out there that I probably haven’t even heard of. When there’s so much choice available it’s difficult to know where to start.

Some people have said to me that a job’s a job – getting up and doing a 9-5 slog to pay the bills is part of life and you just have to deal with it. But you know what? I’m a Chandler Bing and it’s going to take the Monica Geller of jobs for me to settle down.

To translate for the non-Friends watchers of you out there: I’m a bit of a commitment-phobe and if I’m not overly sold on something I won’t be able to stick with it. However I do know that if I am enjoying something I’ll be completely invested and will put my best efforts in. So I want a job that I know I’m going to enjoy, that will give me challenges that I want to face and that won’t leave me longing for the minute hand on the clock to tick just a little bit faster.

My editor here at TARGETjobs gave me some pretty good advice the other day: she told me to make a list of any jobs or work experience I’ve ever done before and then pick out what exactly I liked about each one. So far I have the following:

1)       Various waitressing jobs: dealing with people, making eye contact with Gerard Butler while working at the VIP suite at Murrayfield, and being paid cash in hand so I didn’t have to look at my bank balance.

2)       Volunteering with children in Morocco: doing something worthwhile that was helping other people while getting a kick-ass tan at the same time.

3)       My summer job cleaning out student houses: the incentive to get the job done quicker so I could leave earlier and the intrigue of never knowing what I’d find lurking under a bed.

4)       Transport surveyor: getting to wear a high-vis jacket, being outside in the fresh air and working in a different location every shift.

5)       Operating the checkouts at Tesco: chatting to customers and trying to guess what they were having for tea that night based on what was in their trolley.

6)       Writing for a student magazine and the Glasgow Journal newspaper: having a deadline to work to and being able to see my efforts as a finished product.

7)       Student ambassador: talking to potential undergraduates, promoting something I genuinely wanted to promote and getting to charge things to the uni expense account.

8)       Working on the lamb stall at a farmers market: nothing.

After writing that, although I’ve done some pretty diverse things, I can spot some recurring trends: I like variety, I like working with people and I like to have a goal to work towards. It’s a start. My next step is to spend the next few weeks doing as much career research as I can, find out what working in different sectors entails and look for roles that involve the qualities I just discovered I want. I’ll let you know how I’m doing in my next post…

If you too need help deciding what to do - try out our Careers Report. 

A day at GTI Media - the brand behind TARGETjobs

Loughborough student Lauren Leftley spent a day work shadowing with us this Spring. And here she is now letting you know what she learnt. 

With the help of my university I was fortunate enough to gain a place to spend the day work shadowing at GTI Media, where I experienced particular roles of an editorial manager. GTI Media is a company which deals with the TARGETjobs publications and website, both of which I’m sure most of you are familiar with. The purpose of the day was to help me decide whether a career in publishing would be suitable to me. I also wanted to find out first-hand what it would be like working in a professional working environment.

So, what tasks of an editorial role did I experience?  One of the first tasks of the day was to re-evaluate particular sections of the website. I and two fellow students were given different sections of the website to analyse. Whilst looking at the website we were looking out for what is appealing to students and what didn’t work so well. We were the perfect people for the job being the target audience ourselves. Once this was completed, we were asked to give feedback. This was a done via a group discussion of our findings from the notes that we made whilst looking through the website. Our ideas were listened to and discuss.

The next task was to create a blog piece based on a certain aspect of university life. This put our English studies skills to the test, where we had to create pieces which were written in a suitable manner to appeal to students whilst creating it under time restraints. After completion the blog pieces were looked over by our supervisor of the day and we were provided with positive feedback.

After lunch we started to look at a different aspect of the company; the design of the publications. This put our visual creativeness to the test and was very enjoyable, appealing to my art background.      

So, that’s what we did throughout the day, but how did this help us? The day helped to reveal further insight into what an editor’s role involves but also in a broader sense helped us to understand how the publishing sector works. The information and advice that I received from GTI employees was extremely helpful in helping me to decide whether this is the career for me and what routes there are in order to get into this career.

Due to the day at GTI Media I feel further informed about what a career in publishing entails, this experience was invaluable in helping me decide my future career path and I feel the experience allowed me to find out much more information in comparison to doing my own research through other means.

           

                                                                                                                        -Lauren Leftley 

TARGETjobs News Roundup

Hello and welcome to the weekly news roundup. The one and only place to find all the latest news and career advice published on our main site http://targetjobs.co.uk in the past week.

Let’s start by going back in time. This week we reported on what were 2012 graduates up to six months after leaving university. This helps you to identify the degree subject that makes you most employable,  the average time it takes to get a job after you graduate and other interesting bits of information. 

Let’s not forget this month is full of training contract deadlines. Our law sector expert Julia, has written a handy article listing all the law firms with upcoming deadlines.

Going industry specific now, we let you know what you can do to boost your CV if you don’t get a construction, surveying or civil engineering work placement 

Are you expecting or do you have a 2.2? Fear not! We have a list of employers in construction, civil engineering and quantity surveying employers that accept 2.2s

And we also told you what salary to expect as a graduate property surveyor. 

Talking of salaries, if you are interested in working in the travel industry, we also let you know the pay in that career sector 

As always, we conclude the roundup with the graduate jobsdeadlines coming up next week. 

Hope you enjoy the weekend and it is sunny where you are. 

My love-hate relationship with law

I'm one of the interns at TARGETjobs and I'm also halfway through a law degree. This week I'm giving you my insights into the law experience so far and the importance of perseverance!

I've found that telling people that I study law tends to elicit one of two responses: either ‘Oh wow, how exciting!’ or ‘But why would you do that to yourself?’

I've been back and forth between the two sides myself. A lot. There were many, many times in my first year that I doubted whether I was cut out for law and I actually considered leaving and reapplying for a different course once or twice. However, now I'm at the end of my second year, I think that a law degree is like an annoying song you hear on the radio for the first time and vow you’ll never like – it grows on you.

Law school really throws you in at the deep end from your first week and if you’re anything like me, you spend the first year pretending you know what’s going on and pining for the familiarity of a school classroom. I'm so glad I didn't quit though. In your second year you know what you need to do and you have much more of a sense of direction (you also learn how to balance your social life and work). A year ago I would have avoided talking about the legal profession wherever possible; OK, it still scares me but now it’s hard to get me to shut up about a legal reform or case (which I find exciting regardless of everyone around me falling asleep).

It’s a lot of work but now I love my degree so much that I've extended it to four years and I'm looking forward to getting some more legal work experience before leaving uni. Of course there are still times when I can’t bear to trawl through another endless judgement or even look at my statute book, but they've become far less frequent.

Law students, persevere until you can give an extremely long and convincing answer (backed up with cases and legislation, naturally) to the question ‘Why would you do that to yourself?’ It’s definitely worth it.

- Laura