I always knew it was going to happen, but somehow it still surprised me when it did. In my third year at university, talk turned to graduate jobs, and I realised that I was going to have to make some plans for my life. Unlike some of my friends, who had spent their summers in internship jobs with a view to getting on a graduate scheme at a big organisation, I had decided to journey to far flung corners of the world during my breaks from university, teaching English in Asia and South America. This left me feeling rather like a blank canvas, which I tried to see as a positive thing, and so I set about trying to think about what kind of positions might be fitting for me.
The first thing I did was to make an appointment at my university careers service. The problem with this, though, was that they had a wealth of information about how to get graduate jobs in your chosen area, if you had worked out what that was. The staff there seemed a little fed up of confused finalists expecting them to provide answers to all the tough questions in their lives. It was apparent that I was going to have to do a little more thinking by myself before I could enlist the help of somebody who didn’t know me.
I decided to start scanning all the job adverts printed in newspapers, to get a better idea of opportunities that were available. Part of my job search involved expanding my outlook to get a better sense of potential career ideas, beyond the classic graduate scheme jobs and ‘professions’, which I didn’t think were for me. From scanning a large number of these I managed to get a good grasp of the kind of roles that interested me and their requirements.
I could see that the kind of jobs I was interested in were mainly in the charity sector, but most of the jobs advertised required that applicants needed to have a demonstrable interest in the charity sector and some work experience. I was concerned that this might be difficult for me to illustrate, so I decided to apply for internship jobs and work experience in the charities that I was interested in. I was offered a couple of placements at medium sized UK charities. After working as an assistant at both of these for a couple of weeks, I was convinced that this was the kind of thing I wanted to be doing. After a few weeks, I had a phone call from somebody I had worked with at one of the charities, saying that there was a vacancy that they would like me to fill. I was pleased that I hadn’t gone for a graduate scheme like most of my friends, and the graduate jobs market had not been quite as much of a nightmare as I had expected!
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