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What Career Manager can offer students – Professional Development in work placements

The IET’s Career Manager isn’t just for those in employment; students can begin using this tool to record their professional development whilst in work placements.

Career Manager is the IET’s online skills development and recording tool for members, with a wide range of uses and benefits

It can be used to plan, record and review your career to date, make professional choices, record your competences on the way to professional registration and even profile the kind of career you’d be most suited to.

Some of these areas are of small interest to you as students, however, as an ‘engineer in training’ you’re likely to be looking at long-term goals and eventually professional registration, and it can help you with that: right now!

Career development


Career development is made easier with Career Manager, through skill profiling against recognised competence frameworks and using one central place to collate all your career information, achievements and experience. What you may not be aware of, is that so many of the things you may do in work experience placements can count towards your competences. This means you’ll already begin to start ticking some of the many necessary boxes that will help you achieve professional registration further down your career.

The majority of students will take one or more work placements whilst in education – and many will go so far as to take a year out in industry. By simply recording everything you work on and achieve whilst in placements, you’ll be ahead of the game, compared to other graduates.

The tool is simple and easy to use (so check out our simple beginners guide online, and also check out IET.tv soon for some video tutorials), and by focusing on the relevant areas you’ll begin to put together a good record of your experience to date. Regularly go back and update it and you’ll already have half your CV written ready for graduation and a good number of competencies to your name.

Getting started


So what do you need to be doing? Firstly take a look at the personal profile area. Record here an outline of your work placements to date and the jobs you undertook. Whenever necessary this information can be exported to a word document – great for adding to your CV on graduation.

The next area all students should look at is the competence assessment area. Here is a simple to use section that lets you self-assess and evidence the competences you’ve already fulfilled. At regular intervals during your placements, sit down and using the guidance offered, look at what boxes you may have ticked, and to what level. Sure, it's unlikely that you’ll be ticking all the top boxes, but you may surprise yourself at how much you can already note as achieving.

Taking these little steps will really put you ahead of the game, and they don’t take much of your time. Everything you record is securely saved and as the years move on, you’ll find that you’ll benefit from using Career Manager more and more.

But the big point is this – it’s never too early to start. Register your intention that you wish to work towards professional registration as soon as you go on your first placement and then keep recording. You’ll find that you’ve already set yourself on the correct path, and in addition, you’ve got a great CV to show to potential employers when you leave education and begin your full-time career in the industry.

Career Manager allows you, the student, to:

  • Input and store personal and career details that automatically generates a CV;
  • Register your intent to start working towards registration and submit an online form (once you’re working);
  • Gives you the option to record technical and business skills evidence developed from a university project they have been working on – whether on your own or as part of a group task. Team work is a key competence for engineers/technologists who apply for professional registration;
  • Provides you with the option to set development objectives, plan actions and training for career development by identifying training needs/further learning;
  • Allows you to keep a record of all tasks they have undertaken at University, during a gap-year, during a summer/industrial placement, which can be downloaded to Microsoft Word and used to demonstrate your key skills to an employer/tutor/lecturer;
  • Helps you to think in a logical manner to record evidence to support personal competence to demonstrate interpersonal and communication skills.