Hello, my name is Chris and I'm a third-year Economics student at the University of Nottingham,
and I'm going to be speaking about my experiences of using the Careers Service.
Now, I have used the Careers Service a lot, and I think the reason is that I arrived at university
really without the foggiest clue of what I wanted to do after university and in a wee
bit of a panic. So if you're in that boat, let my story serve as a tale that all will be well,
everything will will figure itself out in the end. So, without further ado, I'm just going to
talk about five different benefits that I have gained from my interactions with the Careers
Service. The first I think has just been support and guidance as I navigated that transition from
"What am I going to do?!" to now being in the incredibly fortunate position that I have a
graduate scheme lined up that I'm incredibly excited to get started on. I think this began
within my first few weeks at university when I first signed up for a careers guidance session.
And this was was really really valuable: thinking about a few sensible next steps that would help
inform my career decisions. Then they said, once you've done these, in a couple months' time book
in another session and we'll chat about how these things panned out. And the great thing about these
careers advice sessions is that normally you're speaking somebody who is attached to your faculty,
and it's meant that I'm speaking to the same person as I booked different sessions over the
past couple of years, and so there was somebody at the university who was really invested in my
career. So the second thing that the career service has helped me do is appreciate the
truly staggering range and array of careers that are out there. And so, for example, I went to
a Management, Finance and Consulting careers fair and of course there were some big professional
services firms and the big consulting firms and the big banks, and things like that. But also
there was a chicken manufacturer, and there was an organisation manufacturing concrete, and there was
an organisation doing aviation, and there were government departments, and the Met Office. And
just really eccentric, interesting organisations I never had thought about working for. And once
I realised that some of these organisations existed, I could then go to networking events
and go to employer presentations to find out much more about them. And something that's really good,
once you've figured out a particular sector of interest, are the 'Spotlight On' events, where the
Careers Service gets a bunch of interesting people from a particular industry, puts them in a room,
and they speak about their experiences, how they got to where they are, and any advice they'd
have for people trying to break in. And I went to a few of these. I went to one on charities,
I went to one on environmental organisations, I went to one on "Crime Management and Prevention".
I'd never considered that! The third thing the Careers Service helped me do is get
practical work experience very early on in my university career. So I happened to go along
to an employer presentation from Teach First, and they highlighted that they had a Taster
program that was open to first years. I decided to give the application to go, I was successful,
and I spent a couple of fantastic days in my Christmas of first year in the Teach First officer
in London, getting a practical understanding of the organisation and getting some training.
It did help me realise that maybe teaching wasn't quite right for me at that moment,
so I went back to university, and I went to a Charities and Public Sector careers fair.
And there I went around pretty much every employer and said: "Hello, my name is Chris,
do you do internships for first years?" And eventually I found one organisation,
the Wellcome Trust, who I may well not have come across otherwise, who said yes. I said: "When do
applications close?" They said: "tomorrow!" So I dashed off home, submitted an application,
and a couple of months later I had an offer for an eight-week paid summer internship with this
amazing organisation. I got to meet some fantastic people, work on some really exciting projects,
and it really showed me that, yes, this is the kind of organisation I would love to work for.
The fourth thing I gained were the skills necessary to be successful
in graduate job applications. These processes are sometimes quite intense, and quite long and I had
mixed success with my internship applications in second year. So I booked into an employer-led
mock assessment center workshop. And this was really good because you were being assessed
and getting feedback from people who really do run assessment centres for this high-profile employer.
And also I booked into a mock assessment center run by the Careers Service directly, and then the
following week I had a really in-depth chat with this mock assessor talking about what I did well,
what I did badly, and some practical steps I could take to improve my performance in future.
And I really do credit those two experiences, plus some online resources from the Careers Service
around practicing psychometric tests and things like that, with a much higher success rate that
I had for my graduate applications than I did for my internships. And I think the final thing
I've gained from the Careers Service overall is a huge number of opportunities and slowly the
confidence to go and take them up. I was not somebody who initially was super comfortable
going around a careers fair and just sidling up to employers and chatting to them,
that felt kind of intimidating. But the reason I'm actually speaking to you today is that in my first
couple of weeks at university I went to a showcase for the Digital Marketing Academy, and I ended up
listening to a presentation by somebody from the university's Digital Marketing team. And I went
up to them afterwards and I asked them if there were any opportunities for me to get involved
somehow. And two years later, as sort of a hobby, I'm still doing really interesting video stuff
for the university. And normally, I should add, behind the camera rather than in front of it. I
am not a vlogger by trade. I'm currently operating using a microphone that is taped to my laptop as
a bit of a stand, and I'm lighting myself with a lamp that is sort of dangling from the ceiling.
I will let you judge for yourself whether a career in vlogging is one i should be pursuing! And so if
you are somebody who is at Nottingham or is going to be joining soon, I would just say: engage with
the Careers Service, you have no idea where you might end up! Thanks a lot, I hope this is useful.