How to start building your career while you are still at university (Part 2)
Last week we began looking at how you can start building your career while at university, and in particular how understanding your own specific situation can help you work out what type of opportunities you should be seeking during your course.
In a nutshell:
The profession seeker: If you are studying to enter a specific profession, seek out as many opportunities that are directly relevant to your profession as possible
The problem solver: If you have a particular industry where you’d like to address challenges, seek out opportunities to learn more about that industry.
The subject explorer: If you are looking to get deep knowledge of a subject, but don’t have a specific career in mind, seek out broader opportunities outside your subject, to help you explore what kind of career could be for you.
The skills builder: If you are looking to build a broad range of skills, precisely because you don’t know what your future holds, be bold and explore as much as possible through a wide range of extra-curricular activities.
What opportunities are there to do all this?
This week we have a look at the huge range of opportunities that there will be for you to do this; all while studying your degree. While breadth and scale of opportunities will vary from place to place, every university in the country will have at least some of these available.
Below I outline the types of opportunities that will be available to you, and for each I have given an example of a university that you can look at to find out more.
Volunteering
Your careers service or student union will have a whole host of opportunities to volunteer, whether it be in environmental awareness, social welfare, education or health settings. These can be a chance to give something back to communities who need it (which feels good), but can also help you build new skills, explore industries and jobs, and ultimately find where you fit!
Below is a link to the University of Leicester Volunteering hub, where you can learn about the benefits of volunteering and even log your hours and the skills you’ve gained. They also advertise opportunities. Right now, as I write this, they are showing 46 different volunteering opportunities across a range of areas from education, to health, welfare, marketing, events and more.
Leicester Students’ Union volunteering hub
Entrepreneurship
Every university will have opportunities to enter competitions and gain funding for new business ideas, across all aspects of business and technology. These are the ideal opportunity to try out new ideas. You’ll learn just as much from the ideas that don’t work as you do from the ideas that fly!
Below is a link to a whole load of information about how UCL students can get involved in starting their own businesses. They even have their own business incubator known as The Hatchery where their students and graduates can grow new businesses. Because one of our founders was a UCL student, I spent some months there with Unibuddy!
UCL: Entrepreneurship training and support
Clubs and societies
There will be loads of clubs, societies and sports groups where you can get involved, find like minded people and gain super-useful skills and experience. Try to take on an area of responsibility just outside your comfort zone, so that you are constantly learning and building new strengths.
See below a link to the societies available at Edinburgh. There are hundreds and hundreds of them, from academic societies to faith-based, media, performance groups and social enterprises.
The breadth is staggering!
Edinburgh University Students’ Association - Societies
Internships
Check your careers centre for internships. They could be anything from two days to six months or even longer. Use the shorter internships to explore options and build the skills and evidence you’ll need to land the longer internships.
Of course they are competitive to get on to, so start early and start small!
Below is a link to information about Internships available at the University of Oxford. These range from micro-internships (just 2 to 5 days), through to their flagship summer internship programmes.
University of Oxford internships
Part-time and summer work
It’s usually pretty tricky to find part-time work that is relevant to your course or career ambitions, but that doesn’t mean you can’t try. Summer work can be even more difficult, depending on where you live, where you study and how flexible you are.
You may find you need to make a trade-off between making good money and exploring your chosen industry. But don’t underestimate the skills and knowledge you can gain from even the most basic roles in services and retail.
My part-time work in retail sales while at university felt like a trade off at the time; it paid very well, but wasn’t really relevant to my ambitions. However, in hindsight I can see that it was critical in building my confidence and 1-2-1 communication skills.
Some universities offer more support than others, while some cities will clearly have more opportunities than others. Most Students’ Unions will have a ‘Job shop” and virtually every university will have its own vacancies for student ambassadors, plus library, catering, shop and bar staff.
A decent place to start is the Save the Student website which pulls in a wide range of part-time roles from different jobsites:
Save the Student: Part-time jobs
My final tip is to get yourselves on LinkedIn straight away. Start to follow and link in with companies you might be interested in working for, with industry groups for areas you might be interested in working in, and industry leaders who you think you can learn from. This can be a great way to follow emerging trends in industries you are interested in, and get a sense of what is important to those working in those industries.
It’s also a great place to ask for help and advice. You’ll be amazed how willing people are to help those who are following in their footsteps professionally. I, for one, will always try to answer and help those who reach out looking for advice and support on careers in university marketing and admissions or in education technology.
So, set up your Linkedin profile right away, and if you want to find and follow me on Linkedin, my profile is:
Be curious and try stuff
Remember how we finished last week:
“University study alone does not entitle you to a job, let alone a career; on its own, study will not get you where you want to be in life.
If you are a student, you have now been told. It’s now on you to do something about it.”
And so, the take-away here isn’t really about knowing everything that is available.
It’s about knowing yourself, seeking opportunities that will help you start to build your career, and taking action.
And there are real parallels with a piece I wrote a couple of weeks ago about mindset; it's all about being curious and trying stuff out.
So be curious; look all around you for opportunities to try things, to build skills and to put your skills and knowledge into practice.
But don’t just look; take action, and actually go for these opportunities!
