Invaluable Advice that Takes Fear Out of Choosing A Career for Yourself.
If you're getting ready to graduate, the prospect of going out into the world and starting work can be daunting. Taking the worry out of work.
After You Graduate helps you to identify satisfying careers and navigate the job-search process.
Students often say they’re studying for a degree because a degree ‘leads to a better job’. At the same time everyone knows of graduates, some with good degrees, who are unemployed or employed in jobs they don’t like.
In other words, there’s considerable confusion. Does a degree automatically lead to a better job? Is it, in a memorable phrase, a ‘passport to the middle classes’? Or is it just the beginning? Is it an irrelevance? How do you move from being a successful student to having a job you enjoy?
Some students don’t use their university careers service or pick up books like this, either because of a sunny assumption that a degree will open any doors or because of an unspoken fear that looking at ‘graduate jobs’ means accepting some conformist straitjacket. A fear that there is a limited and tight number of ‘graduate’ jobs – most of which involve wearing suits and climbing (metaphorical) ladders. ‘I think career is a big scary word (certainly frightens the life out of me)’ wrote Andy, a recent student. Following Andy’s advice I’ll state here that my definition of ‘career’ might not be what you expect!
The good news is that there are many opportunities for graduates (and not just in conventional ‘jobs’); tried and tested ways of identifying what type of work you will enjoy; and proven strategies to increase your chances of getting it. This book will take you through these processes from ‘career choice’ to making effective applications, and beyond.
It takes you from asking, ‘What is a graduate job?’ (Chapter 2) to helping you identify what sort of work you might enjoy (Chapter 3). It then explores how to find opportunities (Chapter 4) and goes on to help you in how to present yourself to employers (Chapter 5). This book concludes, in Chapter 6, by looking at lifetime career skills.
The more you understand about the world of graduate employment, the better prepared you will be to carve out an individual and personal career for yourself, and make it one that you will enjoy.
This is very much your own journey. It will probably involve a lot of work – more than you expect. It will require perseverance, flexibility and effort. You will have to use many of the skills, intellectual and personal qualities which you have developed throughout your studies. Because work is so important to our overall happiness, this journey is also
supremely worth doing.
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