Our exhibitions are supported
   by:

Steer your career

You’ve got your degree, so what more do employers want? ‘The answer sadly is quite a lot,’ says Margaret Dane, chief executive of the Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services. Find out why most graduates fail to use careers services and what vital information they’re missing out on.

It’s unlike most students to turn down a freebie, but for those starting out on the difficult search for a top graduate job, a surprising number are failing to take advantage of the free careers advice and facilities on offer from their university’s careers service.

More than a half of graduates admitted that they did not use the careers centre in their final year, and some even said that they were not aware it even existed (Source: Graduate Recruitment Company survey). For graduates, this can sometimes lead to difficulties in finding suitable work.

It’s a topic Margaret Dane, chief executive of the Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services (AGCAS), is keen to emphasise. AGCAS is the professional association of careers professionals in higher education, and the organisation knows only too well how effective its members’ help can be – so long as people use it properly.

‘One of the biggest issues is that graduates don’t get going soon enough,’ she says. ‘There are lots of reasons why they don’t but quite a lot of graduates find it difficult to get engaged in their futures because they’re so pressed by the present.’

Tough coursework deadlines, together with part-time jobs, combine to keep attentions on the here and now, she says. ‘Research shows that over half students work part time during the academic year. Some work so many hours that it’s almost combining full time study with full time work, which doesn’t leave them with much time for anything else.’

It’s a relatively recent change, according to Margaret. ‘I’ve been in this business for over 30 years and I think there’s a marked trend to delaying doing something about job hunting.

‘When I was heading up a careers service eight years ago even then a large proportion of students had something lined up by the time they graduated. Now increasingly they wait until after graduation.

‘That has major implications. The biggest one is that the resources to help them through the process of thinking about what they want and implementing the decisions they make simply aren’t there once they graduate.’

Job choice dilemmas
Perhaps the hardest part of finding that perfect start to your career is knowing what sort of work you’d like to do in the first place, says Margaret.

‘More and more students just don’t know what they want. People are clear about what they don’t want rather than what they do want, but often aren’t clear what the options are.

‘That’s one of the main dilemmas – there are lots of choices. Over 60 per cent of graduate jobs in the UK are open to graduates of any discipline. That means you have huge choices when you graduate, but it also means you often don’t know where to start – it can be overwhelming, which can put you off.’

Margaret adds: ‘Careers services often get accused of just dealing with the big companies – that’s partly because big companies produce materials that have a higher profile – but also because that’s what students see in their everyday lives. The big companies have brand awareness in terms of advertising.

‘However, it’s harder work finding out about the other options. That’s true whether you’re talking about the public sector, which is a huge employer, or whether you’re talking about small and medium sized enterprises, which represent the vast majority of jobs that graduates actually go into. But these sorts of employers are less visible and harder work to find out about, so it’s easier to say ‘that lot never told me’ than to say, “I never bothered looking”.

‘Thinking about your future isn’t easy. There’s a saying that people spend more time planning their holidays than planning they’re lives, and this is true.’

Getting career help
Once you’ve decided to see the careers office, what help is on offer? Perhaps a lot more than you’d expect, says Margaret.

‘They can provide shortcuts and ways of finding out what the opportunities are, ways of preparing for the kind of careers areas are that you might be interested in – getting some relevant work experience or developing some links through mentoring programmes or whatever.

‘Our job is to ask students to start thinking that bit earlier about what they want to do so when they get there they don’t think “I wish I’d done something sooner”.

Margaret adds: ‘What we’re really saying is develop yourself, develop your knowledge, your skills, you interests – think about your values – what’s important to you – and not just where the immediate jobs seem to be.’

She advises popping in to see your campus careers advisers anytime: ‘There isn't a limit on how much you can use a careers office – there's nothing stopping you going in and having a quick chat and using the resources in the office. A quick 10-minute conversation can take you quite far.’

The skills debate
Just being good at a particular subject or set of skills isn’t going to guarantee a top job with your first application, as Margaret warns.

‘One of the biggest issues in the UK economy in terms of graduate employment is that there is quite a big mismatch in what students want to study and what employers actually need. People think if they study such a course they will definitely get a job in that field – the reality is different.

‘We’re not in a planned economy, but somewhere along the way there has to be some balance between the jobs available at the end of the day and the subjects students are studying.

‘Employers are quite frustrated that the higher education is allowing people to study things where they aren’t opportunities but isn’t encouraging them to study for things where there are.’

She adds: ‘The Government's kind of approach is very much bum's on seats and it's about getting the numbers going to university rather than getting the right people into the right jobs. The end result of the approach they're taking is just to get people into higher education and it's not so much about what happens to them after they leave.

‘My argument from a careers adviser point of view is that it is important for people to study something that they enjoy and they're good at but it doesn't automatically mean they'll get a job in that field.’

Pushing the careers message
Getting students to actually use the careers help and facilities available is far easier said than done, as Margaret readily admits. In a bid to forge greater links with the student body, careers services are becoming far more proactive.

‘They're much more integrated into the institutions,’ Margaret explains. ‘The work done on campus now is very much linked to working with the academic courses and the particular schools and departments.

‘Careers modules in many cases are directly part of the curriculum. Some are assessed because students are very utilitarian - if they don't get a mark for it they don't do it. I have a colleague who was doing a talk for a group of students and one student said, “Is there any assessed material in this talk?” She replied “No, but there's plenty of life material in it,” and the student still walked out.

‘That sort of person would often say “I never got any help from careers service,” but when it was offered they were unwilling to take it up.’

Margaret adds: ‘A lot of institutions do drop-in and outreach - they almost sit in the corridors and say “Come and see us and think about your future”. There's a lot of awareness that if you don't go out to students, they won't come to you. You really have to push quite hard - even if it's in their own interests they don't necessarily recognise that.’

Gaining the advantage
It’s undeniably an extremely competitive market for the best graduate jobs, so what can you do to give you the edge?

‘It's about much more than just having a degree,’ Margaret says. ‘Students often say “I've got a degree, what more do they want?” - the answer sadly is quite a lot. It's about becoming aware of what employers are looking for and a lot of that is about the skills debate.

‘Skills can be anything from the practical and knowledge in a particular subject are - scientific and techniques and so on - but can also be the soft skills like communication, organisation skills, team working, presentation skills, which students can develop through their coursework.

‘Careers services try to help students to understand what they're learning through that experience - often they can't identify that and can't articulate it. Even when they're getting good experience they're not able to put it into words – it’s a very mechanistic approach.’

In terms of student skills, I think that maybe there's an issue about academic staff - they've got to turn students on to understanding what's happening. They might do a group project, but still not understand that that helps their team working - making things a bit more explicit and transparent - making the connections.’

There comes a point though, that the standards set by recruiters can seem impossibly high, as Margaret points out: ‘I can't really believe that when 50 per cent of the population are in university, that employers can't find the right person. What are they after - bionic people?

‘In a way their expectations are so high that you almost have to query them - I think there's a view sometimes in the university sector where they think “these employers are never satisfied” - we try to do what they want, and they change what they want. It’s a spiral of expectation.’

Targeting your search
Once you’ve got an idea of what sort of work or sector you’d like to enter, you should begin a carefully planned campaign of applications, says Margaret. But she warns that without some idea of direction, you’ll end up getting nowhere.

‘Job hunting isn’t difficult once you get tuned into where to find the information, and carers services do publicise that and really work hard but it's a case of taking a horse to water. If you don't know what you want, just firing your CV off - either directly or indirectly to employers - isn't a very successful way of getting a job because the reality is that you get rejected and then begin to feel very disheartened.

‘What we say is that you have to start by thinking about what you want and then target the employers and really put some effort into it - it's better to do six really good applications than 60 bad ones. You'll get a far higher hit rate with quality rather than quantity.’

She adds: ‘When you get to an interview, often the first thing they say is “Why do you want to work for us?” If you don't know because you haven't thought things through, it's not going to help anyone and you'll just get rejected.

‘The main reason that people get rejected is because they don't know why they're there. If you can't convince yourself, how are you going to convince someone else?’

A measured approach
While there’s a huge amount of pressure on today’s graduates to apply for – and get – the very best jobs, this shouldn’t be allowed to cloud long-term goals and objectives, according to Margaret.

She says that just because you don’t get a good graduate job straight away after graduation, it doesn’t mean you won’t go on to great things at a later date.

‘There is a lot of research that finds there's a movement towards moving into graduate level jobs over time - the phrase coined is the gradual graduate which means that you don't necessarily get there immediately but you will get there. It's not now or never. It's sometimes a matter of time or doing further study.’

She adds: ‘It can be daunting, but there is help available. Just start thinking about what you want and what you don’t want. It is tough but there are people there to help you do it.

‘Be fair to yourself and the message is start as soon as you can - if you haven’t started yet then do it now.’

Companies Recruiting