Planning your approach

Welcome to our quick guide on getting started when you don't know what to do. Part of our career essential series. We will go through a brief overview of what career planning looks like, followed by understanding your options and generating ideas. And then we will conclude with planning your next steps and highlighting the support available. Take a moment to reflect on the diagram on the screen. I would expect that many of you relate to number one or possibly two. We can support you wherever you are on this diagram. Career planning is unique to all of us, and it can be easy to compare ourselves to our peers or others around us, and feel we aren't where we should be. We want to reassure you that all of the above scenarios are okay and that there are steps you can take to move forwards, however daunting that may seem. It's easy to think of a career as a set of linear choices, where we decide what we want to do and make progress, consistently getting better at the job we do and progressing up a career ladder, like the image on the left. In fact, when most people think about their career, they are referring to the wide range of jobs, education, professional learning, volunteering, and other experiences, which we connect together and call a career, more like the squigly diagram on the right. And that is something you have already started through your studies, part time in work, being part of a society, internships, and work experience, et cetera. So career planning isn't always about setting a lifelong goal and working towards it. It can be about finding the next step or the next squiggle. By career planning, we are talking about your next step or steps after graduation and not your whole life. Circumstances can and they will change. Experience will influence things, and luck will play a part, and it's good to be open to this. The Career Compass framework has been developed to enable you to make progress of planning for the next steps in your future thinking and planning, regardless of where you are at at the moment. Today's session mainly sits in the first two segments, which is understand yourself and discover what's out there. When starting out with your career thinking, being flexible is really important. You are not tied to your degree subject and keep an open mind to the options that are open to you. Employers hire graduates for their intelligence and their capacity to learn. They are unlikely to focus solely on your ability, but more that you possess a blend of ability, motivation, and fit. Having elements of all of these combined with your capacity to learn and develop will be what appeals to graduate employers. Building experience will help your understanding of all of these parts. I'd like to illustrate here an example of a non linear pathway since the students MSC. Note that the accounting roles are very different from each other and they're quite varied and that they're in different sectors. It's also useful to note that the valuable transferable skills that will have been built up through casual jobs and through the gap year in Africa as well, so important to keep all these notes in mind. So you have many options, and while we think having many options can put you in a strong position, it can also feel very overwhelming. And the next part of this guide will focus on generating your career options. So what are your broad options? Large graduate recruitment schemes or one of them, small and medium sized enterprises. The not for profit sector, the public sector. And of course, other opportunities are further study, as well as starting your own business too. This guide is aimed at earlier year students, and many graduate roles are not degree specific, so it's good to focus on job descriptions and not job titles. Think about your strengths, knowledge, skills, and match the requirements. These are, of course, broad employment options, and as I mentioned, you can also start your own business or also going into further post graduate study. The most visible are graduate schemes with high numbers of vacancies. It can feel that if you don't make the graduate scheme, that you can't work for that organisation, but that isn't the case. It's possible to get an entry level role and work your way up. If you miss these this year or applied and were unsuccessful, it is still possible to apply for next years. The public sector is a major employer of graduates and is the biggest employer in Scotland. The University of Edinburgh is the second biggest employer in Edinburgh, and this equoints to lots of potential opportunities. It is important to remember that different sectors have different recruitment cycles, use our sector information to research and find out what happens in sectors that you are interested in. To generate more career ideas, here are some ideas. You can explore ideas related to your subject in prospects, each profile links to relevant job areas to your subject. Remember though that you're not tied to your degree subject. Other resources are a toolkits and student guides, and you can also use on prospects Job Match and Career Planner. Job Match will generate the types of career areas that may be suitable, and Career Planner will generate a list of possible job options, a great accessible starting point. Use friends and family and be curious and ask people about their jobs and their work situations to generate more career ideas. Make a list of family, friends and acquaintances and make a point of engaging them in conversation about their work. Have some questions ready at all times. For example, what's a typical day? What other jobs are done in your workplace, and what projects have you been involved in, for example? And look around you. One simple way of getting an idea of what's out there is to have a look. Now that you're thinking about your future career, you can view the world around you slightly differently. If you have a part time job, what other jobs exist around you and what process had to take place for the news to appear on TV or a mars bar to appear in Tesco? What jobs would have been involved in making these things happen? Also thinking about what opportunities are there at the university that you could take up to help build that experience. Societies, volunteering, part time work, competitions, and student rep roles are ways to do this. And some final takeaways I'd like to leave you with here are to be curious and to keep an open mind. Ask questions and really challenge yourself to consider all that is around you and open to you and really thinking about the different ways and the wide ways you can build experience. Career paths are often not linear, and exploring those squiggles can be a very helpful learning experience. Employers are looking for that blend of ability, motivation, and fit, and use our resources to help you plan your next steps. And finally, connect with us. Jobs are advertised on my career Hub. You can find lots of opportunities about our events through there as well. If you're interested in blogs, those can be found written by your previous interns, as well as staff and employers are on the informed Career Service blog, and you can also find out about our campus internships for the employ.ed on campus through the blog as well. There is a full list of links to all of the resources mentioned in the guide today, and this can be found and referred back to in the note section on Media Hopper. We hope you found this quick guide useful, and we look forward to seeing you at one of our events soon. Thank you.