Graduate job plan

Large or difficult tasks are more easily tackled if they are broken down into smaller tasks, so let’s see what we can do with this very large task of getting a graduate job.

1. Decide what kind of areas you want to go for. If possible, book a one-to-one interview with your university careers adviser if you want to talk it through. You can also make use of online resources before you meet up – check out what your own university offers or visit some of our recommended sites.
   If you don’t know where to start, other chapters in this book should help. Remember that Part 1 covers what’s out there, so you might want to use it to remind yourself of what the options are.
2. Prepare your CV and LinkedIn profile and keep them updated. Use Chapter 11 ‘Making applications: getting past the first post’ to help you get started.
3. Tell the people who will write references for you about your plans and give them a copy of your updated CV.
4. Check dates and deadlines, look at job advertisements, visit careers fairs, follow your careers service on Twitter.
5. Make applications for: jobs; postgraduate courses; internships.
6. Prepare for interviews: read (and act on!) Chapter 12 ‘Succeeding in selection’.
7. Get feedback – from employers who have interviewed you, employers who did not invite you to interview; friends and tutors.

• Steps 1 and 2 are SLOW – they need the biggest investment of time, so you need to get started on this early in your final year or even sooner, perhaps in your first or second year.
• Step 3 is QUICK but important – you may need to provide updates from time to time; and
• Steps 4 to 7 are MEANDERING – less of a straight line and more of a cycle that you will repeat a number of times, and that you should spend some time on each week.

Note that time doesn’t always pass at the same speed, and that some tasks are quick to do while others are slower. Anything that involves other people takes time to organise – for example, try to avoid getting someone to check over an application the day before it’s due in – they may not be free, and you won’t have time to make changes. You can’t control other people, but you can control what you do and when you do it – so take advantage of that. Make sure that every week you do something, big or small, to advance your career plan.

Increasing your employability

University life is full of opportunities to increase your attractiveness to graduate employers, while at the same time testing out your own ideas about your future career. If you struggled to think of something to say in your UCAS personal statement, then act early to ensure that you have plenty to say to a graduate employer about how you have spent your time at university and what kind of difference that has made to you as an employee.

In Chapter 9 ‘Work experience: making it purposeful’, we talk at length about work experience, both paid and unpaid. Remember that, for some careers, relevant work experience is an essential requirement, so don’t leave it too late. Your university careers service or job shop will help, and remember to use online resources too. There are useful opportunities within your university, such as representing your peers on a staff–student liaison committee, or being a student ambassador on open days. Think about the benefits of getting involved with a student society, too. All societies depend on events for their success, such as meetings, matches, competitions, trips and fundraising events. Consequently, if you’re an organiser or officer of your society, you will develop lots of experience and expertise in event planning and organisation. In many societies there is an opportunity to learn about topics such as health and safety, finance, marketing, and aspects of the law, as well as developing strong interpersonal skills and the ability to take responsibility for money, equipment and people. Look at the following table in the brilliant example for the employability skills you could develop, and tell an employer about, with three of these examples.

If you are still a student, try to map out the opportunities you have between now and graduation for becoming more employable. Include vacation work, paid part-time work, voluntary opportunities, work placements and other student activities.

Think also about your life outside university, especially if you are a home-based student. You still have time to find and enjoy activities that will make a difference to you, the applicant. This is not just about employability, but about presenting yourself as a well-rounded person – and enjoying what that feels like.

Map out the opportunities between now and graduation for increasing what you can offer to a prospective employer.

Early deadlines

Next, let’s look at early deadlines for postgraduate study and graduate jobs. These take many students by surprise, especially those who, perhaps understandably, assume that the beginning of their final year is the time for action. If you habitually hand in assignments at the last minute, now is the time to break the habit if you want to maximise your chances of securing a job in a competitive labour market.

Some organisations have a cut-off date and candidates can apply up to that date. Others operate a first-come, first-served approach, which means that, once the places are filled with suitable applicants, no more will be considered. That means you can’t predict when exactly the application process will close. Either way, if you know what you want to apply for, it makes sense to apply early. This will give the impression that you are motivated and organised.

Ones to watch

• Postgraduate teacher training applications in England and Wales, for both university-led and school-led schemes, are made through UCAS Teacher Training (UTT). The UTT/UCAS system opens in late October for training courses starting in the following autumn, and applications can be made right up to the beginning of the academic year. Individual training providers must open their programmes to applicants for a minimum of two weeks and can then decide when to close. Many providers will fill their places before Easter or even Christmas. Check the UTT website for guidance and aim to apply as early as possible.
• Law: applications to training courses to become a barrister (Bar Professional Training course) must be made between early December and early January; exact dates for each year are at www.barsas.com. Application deadlines for training contracts (prospective solicitors) vary according to the law firm. There is a useful list on the website www.lawcareers.net. For the Bar, applications for scholarships via the Inns of Court close on the first Friday of November.
• Postgraduate courses: some have a specified and non-negotiable closing date, for example the clearing house for postgraduate courses in Clinical Psychology each year identifies a date in early December, but advises applying by mid-November to ensure processing before the Christmas vacation. Many have no published closing date, but will close when full. Don’t be lulled into a false sense of security. Places are limited and, once a programme leader is sure that they have got enough applicants to fill all the places they have, they may well stop admitting to the programme or may only run a waiting list. Also, admissions tutors may well be away from the university over the summer. So, although it may be tempting to leave these applications until you have got through your finals, it may not be wise. You can find more information on www.prospects.ac.uk – go to postgraduate study, and look on the websites of individual universities if you know the course you want to do.
• Graduate training schemes: some have closing dates in the autumn term, so you need to be quick off the mark and well prepared in order to complete your application. Get early information from your careers service and ask for their advice about useful websites.

Keep checking your careers service website and social media sites for deadline reminders.

Know your deadlines and apply in good time – you will appear motivated and organised to employers and you will avoid last-minute panics.

Balancing job applications with final-year study

This is our fourth critical factor in managing dates and deadlines. We’re not going to pretend that this is easy – but it is possible – and, somehow, you are going to have to do this. When the graduate job market is tough, you have to start earlier and keep going to get your job.

Having a clear schedule of your academic deadlines and workload is the essential first step. The next step is to carry out this work steadily and in good time. This way you will have some spare capacity for the unexpected job application.

Next, have the groundwork done in advance. In the next chapter we will look in detail at making applications. A key point to note now is to have a good, up-to-date CV to hand. It’s great to refer to when you need to give details of qualifications and previous employment, with dates.

Next, be organised. Where possible, keep a saved copy of your applications, as many of the questions will be similar. This also means that you can remind yourself of what you said if you are called to interview.

Finally, be honest. Your tutors want you to get a good job and, while they might also expect full attendance in your final year, they will be flexible about time for interviews, so let them know if you are called for interview; ask them to help you to catch up with anything you missed. You also need to keep them informed so that if they are asked for a reference they can respond immediately.

Do

know your schedule and academic deadlines;

work ahead of your deadlines to create some spare capacity;

carry out the groundwork for your applications in good time.

Don’t:

keep your tutors in the dark about your applications and interviews.

Project planning

A project is a piece of work that is carried out within a set timescale, with predetermined goals and agreed resources.

During your course you may have learned something about project planning and project management, especially if your course includes a work placement. This knowledge will be useful in the workplace, but it can also be applied to assignments, job hunting and even planning a holiday or a spell abroad. You can see how easily the examples just listed fit our brilliant definition. There are excellent resources to help you get to grips with project management, including software and reference books. Even something as simple as a countdown on your computer will keep you aware of the number of days left to a given deadline.

Treat job hunting like a project and it will become more concrete, manageable and achievable.

Quality standards

Thirdly, projects have quality criteria to ensure that each piece of work that is produced towards the final project is of a good enough standard. You will need to ‘quality assure’ your CV, your applications and your interview technique. You can get objective and experienced feedback from your careers service; think about other people who might help, especially those in senior positions in employment who are used to recruiting staff.

Make a note in the table below of people who might give you feedback.

Name	Role	Date contacted

Managing your time

Earlier in this chapter we talked about time management: put simply, this involves balancing what you must do against what you enjoy doing. Even within work or study, some people spend more time than they need on aspects that interest them, at the expense of things they need to do but enjoy less.

Getting your friends to help

A really good tip to help you to manage your time is to have a friend or friends who will work with you, and to agree among yourselves a pattern of work nights, social nights, spells in the library and so on. The evenings you earmark for socialising might take advantage of special offers, such as two-for-one cinema tickets or a cheap deal for students in a local restaurant.

Make planning your time into a shared activity with one or two friends, so that you can keep each other organised.

Use a to-do list

Using your schedule of academic deadlines and your graduate job plan, try starting each week with a list of jobs to be done. Then at the beginning of each day or study session decide what you will work on. Big tasks are daunting and difficult to start, so break them into smaller steps. For example, ‘complete my application for Superstores Graduate Training Scheme’ might have you staring at the screen or page, stalling at the more complex questions and putting it off until the day of the deadline. How might you break this task down into smaller steps?

You could:

• gather your factual information (qualifications, previous employment and so on, which should be to hand in your updated CV);
• research the company and the job information and identify aspects that you can include to indicate a good fit between you as an applicant and the company’s values, aims and requirements;
• draft your personal statement/answers to open-ended questions and arrange for a careers adviser or tutor to have a look;
• set a day and time to clear away distractions and complete the form.

Break a large task into smaller achievable steps, each with a deadline.

Do the important/urgent test

The second useful tip is to use the important/urgent test. These two words don’t mean the same! Urgent indicates a time deadline, while important refers to the impact of the task. So an assignment or a job application due in this week is both urgent and important, a decision early in your degree about your final-year dissertation topic is important but not urgent, signing up by 12 noon for a free coach for a night out is urgent but not important (you could get there on the bus, you could do something else), and deciding who’ll do the food shopping next week is neither urgent nor important. So think about the tasks on your career planning list. Using the following chart, tasks can be graded A, B, C or D to indicate their urgency and importance.

	Important	Not important
Urgent	A	B
Not urgent	C	D

Looking back at the examples we have just given, you can grade them according to this table, so an assignment or job application due in this week is category A, both urgent and important.

Have a look at these tasks and grade them A, B, C or D.

• Returning four overdue library books.
• Doing your laundry.
• Meeting your tutor to discuss their feedback on your work.
• Drafting a CV for your booked appointment with a careers adviser tomorrow.

We would suggest in order of the list they are: B, D (unless you leave it till you have run out of everything, in which case B), C and A.

When you write your ‘to-do’ list, try to apply this grading to help you to prioritise.

It goes without saying that ‘urgent and important’ must be tackled first. In the workplace, ‘urgent but not important’ can often be dealt with by delegating; you probably don’t have this option, but many tasks in this category are in any case relatively small and can be dealt with quickly and ticked off on your list.

‘Not urgent and not important’ tasks need to be kept under review in case they become urgent or important. In our earlier examples, next week’s food shopping will become both urgent and important if the fridge and cupboards are empty; and your dissertation topic becomes urgent as well as important if it has to be formally approved in a week’s time.

Your own time is one of your best resources – and you are in charge of it.

Key dates: knowing where to look

Whatever your degree subject, you are almost certainly involved in researching information and developing good research skills. You need to apply these same skills to accessing good, up-to-date job information. Make sure that you know how this information is communicated at your university, for example through social networking sites, text messaging, email distribution lists, careers service websites and even posters and notice boards, and keep up to date. Your careers service may give you a list of graduate job websites and you may find others. Be aware that the Internet is unmoderated and don’t assume that all websites are accurate and reliable.

Check that the website you are using is:

• well presented – written in grammatically correct English and free from spelling mistakes;
• relevant to you – e.g. suitable for higher education students seeking jobs in the UK;
• up to date – containing current information and with active external links;
• authentic – can you check the author? Is the website address genuine or passing itself off as something similar? Useful suffixes for websites are .gov for a local or national government body; .org for a non-profit making body or charity; .co.uk for a commercial company; .ac.uk for a UK educational body, and .edu for a US educational body.

Make sure that the graduate job websites you are using are accurate and reliable.

Tips for new graduates

If you have left university it doesn’t mean that you have missed the boat for graduate jobs. Many employers have several recruitment points during the year, and many also recognise that there are some final-year students who choose to concentrate on getting a good result and defer their job search until after finals. However, compared with your situation when you were a student, there are some key differences that you need to tackle in order to manage your graduate plan.

• If you are working full-time you may find it more difficult to have time off for interviews, and consequently feel less motivated to keep on with your job search. Think about how best you can use days off, take unpaid leave or offer to work extra shifts to make up for lost time.
• Keep in touch with your university careers service. Are you on their email distribution list? Have you let them know that you are still working on your graduate plan and welcome their help? Are they running any workshops or bridging programmes to help you into work? Many universities have secured funding to run short programmes for new graduates. Have a look at our brilliant example.

If you have returned home after graduation, or moved to another part of the country, check out what your local university careers service might offer, for example information about local and regional opportunities. Don’t forget to look online; check out the list of sites we recommend.

Keep a record of the skills and experiences you are developing through the job you are currently doing. Graduates in direct-entry jobs often get early responsibility, so think about what being a bar supervisor or shop manager means for your future employability.

In our next brilliant example, Paul shows that by being open to opportunities it is possible to turn your prospects around and take your career plan in an unexpected direction.

Honesty is the best policy

In these situations, honesty is pretty much always the best policy. Missing a closing date is of course to be avoided, but ask yourself what is the worst that can happen if you send your application form in late (if you can – it may not be possible online) with a note of apology. The worst that can happen is that you will hear nothing more, but there is just a chance that there were no other suitable candidates, or that the firm will advertise again in due course and suggest that you reapply.

If you are offered two interviews on the same day, then you do need to decide which job you actually do prefer, now it has come down to it. Accept your preferred interview, then contact the other organisation (your second preference) and say that you already have an interview, so wonder if they can offer you another date. The worst that can happen is that they say no – but they might say yes.

The ‘job offer with another interview next week’ scenario is the one many students worry about, though it rarely happens. When it does, then do remember that you have been offered job number one, but the second job is by no means yours. What not to do is to ask employer number one if you can let him know next week after your second interview. This never goes down well and employer number one may well withdraw the offer and give the job to someone else. If the job on offer is what you want (and you shouldn’t have got this far if it isn’t) then accept it and withdraw from next week’s interview. This is the only fair and honest thing to do.

The last two examples in our list of nightmare scenarios concern clashes between academic work and job hunting, so the obvious approach is to talk to your lecturer(s) for their advice. If there is no flexibility in your course work, then contact the employer and explain the circumstances; you may be offered another date. If not, then you must let this one go – the course work is both urgent and important.

The final example calls for some really firm time management on your part. How much time is at your disposal outside your lecture time? You may need to cancel other plans, but the chances are that you can draft out your presentation on day one, and get someone to look over it early on day two before you prepare the final version in the evening. This, after all, is what will happen at work, so it’s good practice.

The golden rule, if you have a crisis or setback, is to stay positive and talk to a tutor or careers adviser.

• There are four critical factors in managing your time at university: having a graduate job plan; increasing your employability; anticipating early deadlines; and balancing job applications with final-year study.
• Important skills to develop are: project planning; time management; and knowing where to look for key dates.
• When things go wrong, stay calm, be honest and seek advice.