I always knew it was going to happen, but somehow it still surprised me when it did. In my last 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 company, I had decided to travel 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 appropriate 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 plenty of information about how to get graduate jobs in your chosen field, if you had worked out what that was. The staff there seemed a little fed up of vague finalists expecting them to provide answers to all the challenging 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 looking through 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 idea 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 idea 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 show, 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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