Your degree is just isn’t enough
You may have achieved but employers are looking for work experience of some form or other.
Trying to find a job can be a daunting prospect. When you chat to fellow job seekers you discover that they’ve gone travelling in South America, worked with the disadvantaged in India, taught English in Japan or maybe taken a year out and worked for a global corporation like Microsoft.
You’ve sat there thinking that your degree was all you needed and you stood out because you were head of the beer drinking society, sorry mate but wrong! Nowadays your degree is your foundation to working life, but you need to show that you’ve achieved other things, and through these things you’ve learnt useful skills that will help you in your future career.
More than anything else you may have achieved, employers are looking for work experience of some form or other. Richard Budd, Careers Consultant at Cardiff University explains: “First of all, employers appreciate exposure; people having worked before. They’re used to the discipline, the routine of work.
“When it comes to engineering jobs, people who have been exposed to the terminology of the specific discipline that they are working in will actually begin to realise why what they’ve done is important. They will have started to get a feel for what the business is all about, and they are no longer ‘wet behind the ears’,” he notes.
Don’t think of work experience as something you have to do in order to get a job, think of it as an opportunity to prepare yourself for your career and take in as much as you can. By taking every opportunity you are offered, you will come out the other side a much more skilled and knowledgeable candidate. In addition to this, although you have an idea of what the work experience is like, you’ll see it very differently after experiencing it yourself.
“If they’ve done work experience either preferably as a year out, or alternatively as a couple of summer vacation jobs and placements, they will have begun to understand some of the issues surrounding the field in which they are working. So whilst they may not be developing a very specific skill, they are positioning themselves much better to acquire training and benefit from experience when they actually get into the engineering work place,” Budd says.
Work experience can also make you look enthusiastic about your work, which is something else employers look for in a candidate. As far as they are aware, if you are interested and enthusiastic you are going to be the sort of person that can help take the organisation forward. But you also need to make sure that that enthusiasm comes across in your application, and hopefully, your interview. Now you’ve got this experience behind you, you need to help the employer make the connection – how what you’ve done can be of use to them.
Make sure you clearly show them this and you’ll be on your way to landing your first graduate job. Couple your experience with your enthusiasm by being aware of what the company does, and what it hopes to do in the future, and you’ll shine above the rest.
So, don’t just think because you are on your way to earning your degree that you are ready for the working world – if you want more doors to open you need to make that effort and gain real working experience. As Budd explains, qualifications aren’t everything.
“I think that employers would sometimes prefer someone to have a BEng and a year’s worth of experience, rather than someone with a MEng and no experience at all. It’s crucial that any engineering student does some sort of engineering experience somewhere along the line.”
By Keri Allan, Assistant Editor
With thanks to:
Cardiff University’s Careers Service
OTHER INTERNET RESOURCES:
From the IET