Interlude

Completely off-topic, but it’ll make you smile. For those of us who commute into Manchester Oxford Road – how about it?

Would make the crush to get through the ticket barrier a bit more fun. I reckon a chorus of Take That’s “Shine” should do it (but make it Friday as I’m off to London tomorrow to learn about how the EPSRC review research proposals and don’t want to miss the fun).

Post-Fair Blues

I recently got a comment on the Recession pages of the blog reflecting on the frustrations of attending the recruitment fairs. Click here to see what Rajat originally wrote, but I thought the response might be pertinent to quite a few of you, so I’ll address it here with some extracts from his comments.

Rajat’s first point:
“[Employers] want to go to fairs, but not hire graduates easily. These organisations are trying to be soft with students … but from a political perspective they are trying to keep up GOOD IMAGE.”

The fairs aren’t always the best barometer of the graduate and postgraduate recruitment market. We do hear stories of some organisations turning up, just to keep their profile high, with no real intention of recruiting, but these all seem pretty difficult to verify – not sure whether it’s reality or urban myth. Most recruiters are pretty hard nosed – it costs them, in time and money, to attend fairs and deal with all the enquiries and applications that generates. It’s not something most would do if they were sure they wouldn’t be recruiting at all.

Second point:
“Big career fairs help few. Though I’m not saying that big fairs should not be there, but is it really helping students to get a job?”

One really important point about the fairs is that the vast majority of grads and particularly postgrads will get jobs with organisations who don’t go to any fairs. That’s really only the shop window for large organisations with multiple vacancies. If you want to get into these organisations, it’s a good idea to talk to them directly (can give you the edge over those who haven’t) which is why we work hard to attract as many employers to Manchester as possible. However, for many postgrads, they will be working in specialisms where employers have only 1 or 2 vacancies – not enough to justify the cost of going to a fair. That’s where direct applications, using contacts and keeping an eye on one-off adverts is much more likely to pay off – which luckily is what Rajat did: “Personally I got my internship from different channel than fairs!”

Third point:
“International students: I’m one of them and companies which never had VISA restrictions have also come with rules this year- reducing flexibility and opportunities.”

This is a very fair point. As soon as it became apparent that we were heading into economic difficulties in the UK, careers advisers started pushing the message that our international students had to seriously look at trying to find work back home. We knew that breaking into the UK recruitment market would get a whole lot tougher for our international students, in spite of the easing of work permit restrictions. Many of our international students come with ambitions of working for one of the big internationally known brands (particularly the investment banks) but these were often the organisations hit hardest by the financial crisis. To be honest though, they’re also the most competitive organisations to get into even in a boom year, and it’s only a tiny minority of students who get into them when they do have jobs to offer.

Want to know a secret? As careers advisers there was almost a sense of relief that the state of the economy was going to make it easier for international (and home) students to accept that they should at least have a serious back up plan, in case they didn’t get a graduate training scheme place with Multinational X. In the boom years, many saw it as a major failure or embarassment if they didn’t get one of these, in spite of the very long odds.

So what should you do if you’re also feeling the post-fair blues? One thing is to take comfort in the stats (yes, I’m back on that hobby horse):

We received more new job ads (for full time jobs) at the Careers Service for June 2009 than for June 2008.

We’re not saying it’s not tough, but the graduate job market (at least for this university’s graduates) seems to be holding up rather better than you might believe from other reports.

PT Vacancies – MLP e-Tutors

Even before the dust settles on another academic year, we’re gearing up for next year’s work, which means another ad for yet more high-quality part-time work for postgrads – this is our annual call for new Manchester Leadership Programme e-Tutors. The closing date is 13th July, with interview dates set for 23rd or 24th July.

Full details are on our MLP e-Tutor pages but here are a few further insights :

Who can apply to be an e-Tutor?

• In general, you have to be a postgraduate student of the University of Manchester for the duration of the course which you want to tutor. This is because we’ve had administrative problems with on-line access to Blackboard (which is critical for the role) for e-Tutors who are no longer students or employees of the University. This means that most full time Masters students wouldn’t be able to apply, but if you’re doing a part-time Masters over a longer time period (and you could fit it in around your course and exam commitments) it might be a possibility.
• What if you’re a member of university staff? Although we haven’t yet had staff members who’ve also been e-tutors (other than those of us who do it as part of our normal job), if you can come to an arrangement with your employing school/division, we’re happy to consider this. Any solution isn’t likely to be lucrative (we pay the standard GTA rate, and of course, you can’t get paid for the same hours twice!) so you’re more likely to find it acceptable if it’s the course itself which attracts you.
• What if I’m not based in Manchester? Although most of the interaction with the students is through on-line discussions on Blackboard, for the lecture based courses, you will also need to run a couple of face to face tutorials, and, very importantly, attend the weekly lectures along with the students. For all the courses (including the 20 credit research based programme and the unit which is carried out completely on-line), you will need to attend initial and assessment training sessions with the other e-Tutors at set times in the year. You may be able to fit this in around, for example, field work, but it is unlikely to suit someone who is permanently based elsewhere.

What if I’m not an expert in leadership or sustainability?

• The courses are so wide ranging that we don’t expect you to be an expert. However, it’s really helpful if you have already demonstrated your interest in volunteering and/or environmental, social or economic sustainability (could be an academic interest, or extra curricular – or both). The role is more about facilitiation and encouraging students to engage with the subject matter, than being an expert in all subjects covered. That said, you’ll need to engage with the subject matter yourself each week, so even if you’re not an expert, you’ll need to pick things up pretty quickly!

What if I haven’t tutored undergrads before?

• This is a bit more difficult. The tutoring and, particularly, the assessment aspect of the role are pretty challenging. Ideally, we’re looking for people who have already got experience of the basics of teaching at undergraduate level, and are now ready to take it to the next level. Having said that, we have taken tutors with alternative teaching or coaching experience (from the voluntary sector or other educational settings) – but you’ll need to convince us you can deal with criterion based assessment grids and the challenges of fair marking in a subject where there are no clear cut right and wrong answers.

What if I’m an international postgrad?

• You’ll need an excellent command of written English as most of the role involves clear on-line (written) communication to students from all nationalities (and disciplines) – but our cohort of successful e-Tutors has included postgrads from Finland, Italy, India, Canada and even the occasional Brit thrown in to keep our diversity stats looking good.

Any further questions, drop me a comment and I’m happy to answer here.

PT Vacancies – Applications Advisers

We’re now looking to recruit more paid applications advisers to help with the flood of undergrads and postgrads who use our Quick Query service for CV and application feedback – details here. There’s not much time until the official closing date (3rd July) but I’ve negotiated an extension for you – if you get your application in by 7th July, you should still be considered.

If you’ve used the service yourself, you might not have realised it, but our Applications Advisers (as opposed to our Careers Consultants) are generally our current postgrads, mainly PhD researchers working with us part-time. They’ve all got skills and experience which make them ideal for helping other student with job applications, often with prior recruitment, HR or coaching/counselling experience or at least experience of training or teaching so they can empathise with our students and get information across to them (we know what a multi-talented bunch our postgrads are).

It helps if you’ve applied for jobs before, so you understand the application process. It’s also quite pressured – 1-1 discussions with students you’ve never seen before, where you have 15 minutes to establish rapport, understand their issues, read their application(s) and give them feedback to help them improve – and then it’s straight on to the next 15 min appointment. You get to see students from all disciplines and at all levels but most of the basics of applying for jobs are common across the range.

You also get to see all nationalities, which can be a delight and a challenge. You will need excellent written (and spoken) English – you don’t spell or grammar check or re-write CVs, but you do need to be able to point out where a CV needs the student to go away and do some work on the wording or punctuation, as well as the content or layout. However, this certainly doesn’t exclude international postgrads from becoming applications advisers – we’ve had excellent Greek and Canadian applications advisers, who can bring the extra dimension of knowing how tough it can be applying in a language which isn’t your first (OK, Canadian English probably bears some resemblance to UK English but you get the idea).

If you’re interested, I’d strongly recommend coming in and booking a Quick Query session yourself before applying (if you haven’t already used us). The applications advisers and careers consultants running quick query over the summer have been forewarned that you might want to talk about these jobs, so come and talk to us.

You’ll need to be here for the next academic year, so this excludes most current Masters postgrads, though if you’re doing your Masters part-time over a couple of years and can commit to being a student here and available for work at least from August to the Christmas vacation, do contact us. The hours are quite “bitty”, where you might be needed for a couple of hours in the morning, then a couple later on, so it also helps if you’re on campus a lot of the time.

It’s an interesting role, great for your CV, full training is given and you get real appreciation from all the students you help.

If you think you fit the bill, full details are on our website.

Some Of The Slides From Pathways

I’ve uploaded slides from some of the Pathways workshops for those who wanted copies, or those who couldn’t attend. If there are any other sessions you want to see, let me know (just comment on this post) and I’ll see if

a) we’ve still got them, and

b) the author is happy with them being shared on the web.

Bear in mind that these slides are from interactive sessions, so they won’t all make complete sense without the commentary and interaction. For example, with my presentations, the bullet points are really just placeholders for what I want to say – well, what’s the point of doing a presentation if you’re just going to read the text? That said, here they are.

Wired For Work

For this session which Alex Hardman and I ran, I also created a companion website using Netvibes, www.netvibes.com/postgradcareers. I’d strongly recommend looking at it alongside the slides, as it includes

• clickable links to all the websites mentioned
• examples of the types of resources we covered, such as smart starting points for your job search, and examples of some of the vacancy feeds which are out there
• some short videos to illustrate things like “What’s an RSS feed?” and the use of Twitter
• more details of  the “Cautionary Tale” – making sure your on-line presence works for your career, not against it

The tabs relevant to this session are clearly marked “Pathways”, although the other tabs may also be of use (I’ve been using this site as a training aid for other sessions as well).

There’s also a document created by Alex to support the session which more clearly shows you how to use RSS feeds. It’s available here on Google Docs (and linked from the Netvibes site).

Negotiation

Alison Hattersley from Success Factory ran 3 sessions on “Negotiating Your Salary”. The slides you see here are on negotiation in general – the salary bit came from the discussions we had, so if you wanted those specific tips, I’m afraid you had to be there…

Emotional Intelligence

Lyn Bailey, also from Success Factory, ran sessions on Emotional Intelligence. Again, the slides support the session, so may be more useful if you attended and wanted to have access to the slides for backup.

Renewable Energy & “Ethical” Companies

Another post-fair post – I was asked several times at the recruitment fair, both in the PhD Zone and in general queries, about organisations who dealt with renewable energy or energy conservation, and promised to mention it on my blog (as I have trouble keeping 3,500+ bookmarks in my head).

These are a few of the resources which I find useful for these areas:

• Ethical Junction Directory – lists all sorts of “ethical” organisations (ie those who buy into their Ethical Policy), including a range of organisations working in the fields of renewable energy, conservation, recycling, transport and lots more. Doesn’t advertise jobs, but direct approaches to organisations where you can make a good case for buying into their values (and being able to do the job, of course) can be an effective way of accessing the job market in a recession – often better than waiting for the job ads to appear.
• The Energy Institute – their company members’ directory has over 300 company links, subdivided into many niche areas including solar energy, wind energy consultants, biomass waste energy and more.
• yourenergyjobs – this is the jobs site from The Energy Institute, again split into all sorts of specialisms. Currently advertising over 160 jobs.

In addition, it makes sense to investigate those companies in this field who came to the fair, such as Vestas and ENER-G – if they were keen enough to come to the fair, that’s a reasonable indication that they want graduates and postgraduates to apply. See the whole list of fair exhibitors here (but remember to also click on the list of Thursday attendees, linked from this page).

Post Fair Report

Just got time for a quick post-fair post before yet another postgrad event (it’s the Manchester Leadership For Researchers Conference this afternoon). Here are some snippets:

• Seems like many organisations are keeping up their investment in R&D, which is great news for research postgrads or specialist masters. Specific comments I heard were that they need to be ready for the upturn, and if they don’t invest in R&D now, they’ll fall behind competitors.
• Agencies were still reporting demand, even in areas which “everyone” says are in decline. Kinetica recruit in the chemistry and life science sectors, and were doing brisk business on their stand. They pointed out that demand varies geographically at the moment – Yorkshire and the North West were seeing demand in the chemical industry and polymers, while most of their pharmaceutical and healthcare assignments were in the South East. Having said that, Astra Zeneca and Invitrogen are both life science organisations with bases in the North West, and do expect to have demand for postgrads.
• There seems to be increasing interest in using Web 2.0 technology in recruitment. Astra Zeneca were investigating Twitter to see if it would add to their careers information stream, Tessella (and others) already have Twitter feeds, and recruitment agency, Morson, made some interesting comments about using LinkedIn to target scientists and engineers (I’ll try and follow this up to get more info).

There will be more updates from the last couple of weeks of postgrad events (including slides from some of the Pathways workshops) once this last postgrad event is done and dusted. Normal service will be resumed from tomorrow!

Day 2 Of The Fair Today

Although the PhD and Researcher Career Zone is over, there’s still one more day of the Graduate Fair to talk to employers, whether you’re a Masters postgrad, a PhD researcher or an undergrad.

It runs from 10.30-4.00pm, and there’s a free shuttle bus from Piccadilly Station (Fairfield Street, by the taxi rank) if you’re travelling to Manchester by train, or are on our North campus. There will also be a bank of careers advisers available at the fair (no PhD zone today, but I’ll be there, speaking to anyone, at any level, from any discipline).

If anyone didn’t get chance to talk to the Civil Service Fast Stream, Invitrogen or AREVA T&D in the PhD Zone yesterday, they’re here again as part of the main fair. Again, we’ve got more than 70 exhibitors (most of whom were not here yesterday), including:

• Abercrombie & Fitch, ASDA, Arriva, Bunzl, Cargill, Frontier, Greater Manchester Police & Merseyside Police (so we don’t expect much trouble at this fair – unless the Manchester/Liverpool rivalry kicks off…), National Offender Management Service (given the last two exibitors listed, insert your own witty comment here – or tweet me!) – all of whom (and more) are looking for any degree discipline, so those who wanted to see more non-science exhibitors yesterday, here’s your chance.
• Brocade Communications, Schlumberger and Vestas are some of those who specifically mention that they’re looking for Masters postgrads (all the others will, I’m sure, be very happy to consider Masters postgrads for all their general vacancies).
• Costain, Lonza Biologics, Parsons Brinckerhoff, DSTL, Environmental Resources Management are some of the exhibitors specifically looking for science, engineering or IT backgrounds

So, something for everyone, and if you need any more encouragement, here’s a good reason to talk very, very nicely to the Invitrogen exhibitor – use your newly honed negotiation skills to get your hands on your very own fluffy cell to love and cherish.

Recruitment Fair – Weds/Thurs This Week

The big Graduate Recruitment Fair is on tomorrow, Wednesday 17th June, and Thursday 18th June at the Armitage Centre, Fallowfield, Manchester from 10.30-4.00pm.

Some of the biggest names in employment will be there, giving the lie to the story that there are no jobs out there now. It might be a tighter recruitment market than we’ve seen for a few years, but we’re still hearing stories of employers who have too few good applications for jobs they’re trying to fill.

Here are my last minute tips for those who can’t decide whether to go or not:

• Go and talk to employers you’re interested in, even if they don’t have someone at the fair who can talk about the specific job you want. If you’re savvy, you can ask loads of questions to help you figure out if you would fit with the organisation and help you answer the difficult question “so, why do you want to come and work for us?”. You can even do this if you find yourself talking to a very junior new grad who the employer has brought along to staff the stand – try questions like:
  • What training did they get/do they offer?
  • How do they get measured? (If you find out what the organisation values in its employees, could you realistically expect to deliver the results which will result in fast promotion or increased pay?)
  • Do they know any postgraduates working for the organisation, & what jobs are they doing?
  • What’s their boss like? (probably just for the new grads, that one!)
  • What do they think is different about their organisation compared to their competitors

• Go on Wednesday to the “PhD and Researcher Career Zone” if you’re doing a PhD or are a researcher and want to talk to the following organisations about how they and other employers view PhDs :
  • AMEC Group Ltd
  • AREVA T&D
  • **NEW ADDITION** Astra Zeneca
  • BG Group
  • Cabinet Office (Civil Service)
  • **NEW ADDITION** Detica (”Information Intelligence” – part of BAE Systems)
  • Doosan Babcock
  • **NEW ADDITION** Invitrogen
  • National Nuclear Laboratory
  • National Physical Laboratory
  • Tessella
• PhDs can also talk to all the other employers in the main fair, and also come along on Thursday, though there will be no PhD Zone that day. More details about the PhD Zone here.

I’ll be in the PhD Zone on Wednesday, and the general careers advice area on Thursday – see you there.

Pathways Day 2 – 10.30am Start

Thanks to the magic of Twitter, I’ve found out that it doesn’t look like we have the programme for Monday’s Pathways workshops on the web anywhere – oops!

[EDIT: Monday morning - it was there all along, but under the Resources section of the Pathways website. Double oops! Ah well, read on if you don't want to click there.]

If you have registered, you should have had the programme e-mailed to you, but if you were just planning to turn up (just bring your university swipe card), you won’t be aware that we’re giving you the chance for a lie-in (don’t worry, we won’t tell your supervisor/PI – let them think it starts at 8am sharp).

Programme:

10.00-10.30  Registration

10.30-11.00   Intro (that’s Judy and me again, with more explanatory details of the workshops)

11.00-12.00   Plenary workshop – VOX Coaching (…OK, I’ll admit it, I’ve forgotten the title – but it’ll be good, and funny, and relevant, they always are)

12.00-1.00     Choice of workshops – Evidencing Skills, Occupational Personality Questionnaires, Presenting at Job Interviews, Networking to Help Your Career, Interview Confidence, Assessment Centres (by Accenture), Negotiating Your Salary, Emotional Intelligence, Careers in Teaching: School vs University

1.00-2.00       Lunch

2.00-3.00       Choice of workshops – Critical Thinking Skills For Your Career, Occupational Personality Questionnaires, Marketing Your PhD To Employers, Evidencing Skills, Strategic Academic Career Planning, Negotiating Your Salary, Interview Confidence, Emotional Intelligence, Using The Web To Find Jobs (that’s me’n'Alex), Working With Others: MBTI Personality Questionnaires

3.00-4.00       Choice of workshops – Critical Thinking Skills For Your Career, Occupational Personality Questionnaires, Negotiating Your Salary, Interview Confidence, Emotional Intelligence, Working With Others: MBTI Personality Questionnaires, Getting & Keeping an Academic Job, Grant Funding Applications, Networking to Help Your Career

Some are running in lecture theatres, but they may still be very popular, so it’s first come first served. The only thing I would warn you about is that the Negotiating Your Salary workshops at 12noon and 2.00 are in smaller rooms (this format works better for an interactive workshop) but recognising it might be popular, the final session at 3.00 is in a lecture theatre, so if you don’t get in to the first two, you should get into the last one.

Think I’ve got that right, though as I’m at home and don’t have all the documentation to hand, apologies if I’ve got anything wrong. Look, just come along for the whole day anyway, you never know what you might learn…