SPS Employability Officer Annamarie shares her top tips for how SPS students can keep boosting their career potential. the new term.
As you’ve finished your first month and hopefully settling in to life at/ back in at Kent, I wanted to remind you of Employability and Placements related activities that can benefit you and push forward your career planning. I am running a drop in sessions in the Ingram Foyer until the week commencing the 25th of November.
- All stages – Log in to Target Connect – Update your alert preferences for jobs and event alerts, these may have changed for you since last year so please make sure you do this and that you are receiving the information that you need to. Do this with any other job or placement sites that you use such as Gradcracker.
- Please make sure that you register with Gradcracker! They advertise more STEM summer roles, year in industry and graduate opportunities than anywhere else. When you register the site also saves for you the job information for roles that you have applied for. Very handy, I have lost count of the number of students who are offered an interview after the closing date only to find that the information that they need to refer to is no longer there.
- If you are in your second year make sure that your CV is up to date, that you can write effective cover letters and that you practice psychometric tests if you are going to be applying for companies that use these in their selection processes! Check out the Careers and Employability Centre pages here. They are bursting with useful stuff!
- Stage 1 students – You are new to the university and we hope that you are settling in. My advice is this, at the moment you have the luxury of time so use this to investigate, question and build up a picture of career paths that interest you and ways to help you to get there. The Careers and Employability Service are there to help you and run regular events, employer talks and other activities designed to help you.
- Ingram Foyer Drop Ins – Thursday 07.11.19, 12-2pm, Thursday 14.11.19, 12-2pm, Wednesday 20.11.19, 12-2pm and Monday 25.11.19 at 12-2pm.
Your course is already helping you to develop a wide range of employability skills, from report writing to presentation skills.
In addition, the University and Kent Union provide many extracurricular schemes to help you to develop your skills further.
You can volunteer, take part in clubs and societies, work part-time, become a student ambassador or mentor, learn a language and complete a Careers Employability Award on Moodle.
You can also gain Employability Points for your efforts and record and reflect on your employability skills in MyFolio and the Kent Union toolkit.
Find something that suits you and run with it, graduation arrives sooner than you think so find something great to do and some way to record it all!