What do you hope to do after university?

The obvious answer to this question is: to get a job that recognises your talents, offers you the chance to shine, allows you to do interesting things and ideally to earn enough money to have a good lifestyle and to repay your student loans. You could call that the Brilliant Careers answer.

However, in the real world, the answer could be very different. Your first step might be to get a job, any job, just to pay the bills. This may be a service sector job in a supermarket, bar or fast-food outlet, perhaps a job you did part-time while at university – which might make you wonder why you bothered to go to university in the first place. If that’s where you are at the moment, or where you think you might be in the future, read on. We’ll help you to see how any job can help you, even in a small way, work towards your brilliant career. The key is to be positive and assume that there will be a good outcome eventually – though perhaps not straight away.

Your options

Your first step after graduation is usually one of the following choices:

• A graduate entry job: by this we mean a job that demands a degree, and we include graduate training schemes.
• A direct entry job: you don’t need a degree for the job but having a degree will speed your progression and may help with promotion, e.g. police or retail management. A direct entry job can be a key step in your career plan; it can be your active choice.
• A direct entry job by default: likely to be your fall-back plan, perhaps because of stiff competition in your chosen field. You can definitely use this for extending your professional repertoire to gain leverage in the graduate job market.
• Time out by choice, e.g. for travel, perhaps to work abroad, or just for taking stock.
• Postgraduate study: either to qualify for a particular job or for love of the subject (vocational/professional or academic).
• Self-employment – starting your own business.

One handbook, in two halves

How this book can work for you

We were able to write this book because career guidance is our specialism. Between us we have a span of experience including practice, management, practitioner training, research and broadcasting. We feel confident we know what we’re talking about, and we think we can help students to manage their career well. We also believe we can help fellow academics.

Delivering graduate employability is no longer an optional extra

Concerns about graduate employability are expressed very simply: ‘Will I get a job at the end of my degree?’ and ‘Is a degree worth the debt?’ are questions frequently asked at open days. If admissions tutors cannot reassure applicants that as undergraduates they will be supported in this aim and that the cost is indeed worth it, applicants will go elsewhere, taking their tuition fees with them. Ensuring that your undergraduate programme tackles career development alongside the subject discipline has never been more important.

Research in the field of employability points very clearly to the importance of integrating career awareness and career development in the curriculum (Knight & Yorke, 2004, Cole & Tibby, 2013). This message has been taken up by the Confederation of British Industry and by the National Union of Students (CBI & NUS, 2011, NUS 2014), who together urge undergraduates to work on their employability from day one of their course, and was most recently endorsed by the Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR, 2015).

Employability is long established as a key metric in annual university league tables but government policy is now relentless in its emphasis on graduate employability, defined as ‘teaching students the transferable work readiness skills that businesses need, including collaborative teamwork and . . . a positive work ethic’ (BIS, 2015). Career development and employability preparation, alongside entrepreneurial awareness, will be increasingly expected of a degree course.

Use this book to structure tutorials or for employability teaching

If you are a personal tutor, the employability coordinator in your department, or you feel at a loss when students come to you for help and advice on careers, this book is for you.

It can help you personally because it has everything you need in one place. You can also use it to structure input to scheduled tutorials or the employability element of the curriculum.

Unlike other careers handbooks, we explain how the graduate labour market operates, and have included a lot of labour market information. This is in addition to the practical know-how about career planning and job applications that all students need at some stage, and many students told us they wanted. Although written for students and graduates, there are exercises and tasks that you could build into taught sessions and workshops. For example, Chapter 2 ‘The graduate labour market’ and Chapter 3 ‘Labour market information: analysis of what graduates do’ both offer a theoretical and knowledge base for your teaching on skills and employability modules. You could also use Chapter 10 ‘Dates and deadlines: your timeline for action’ and Chapter 11 ‘Making applications: getting past the first post’ to structure your tutorial input. Most chapters end with a call for action, inviting the student reader to take a practical step in developing their career thinking. You could use these as formative assessments. We hope you find this book works alongside your input, and enhances both the teaching and learning experience.

Look beyond the headlines on graduate employment

You might be concerned about your graduate: you might think they should be doing something about getting a job, even though all their time is taken up with the course and perhaps some paid work. You might even be wondering what was the point of them working so hard for their degree, given the uncertainty about graduate employment. However, if you look beyond the headlines, you will find that there are jobs, although securing a brilliant job might take time and effort. This book shows your graduate how to navigate the graduate labour market, and how to keep going when it gets tough.

The 21st-century graduate faces a different job market

We also have a message for you, which is this. If you are basing your advice on your own experience of getting your first job, particularly if you are a graduate, your advice is out of date. The graduate labour market has changed: although jobs are readily available, entry standards are high and competition can be tough. Employers now expect graduates to have developed a good set of transferable skills and understanding before they start graduate-level work. To do this, your graduate might have to take on unpaid work, take up an internship, take a fixed-term contract or start with a non-graduate job. None of these reflects badly on your graduate: this is simply how the graduate labour market works in the 21st century.

Keep an open mind and challenge your graduate to do so too

In this book, we support your graduate, but we also challenge them. We go so far as to tell them that any job is better than no job, and that even the most lowly task can help them build up the know-how that applies to any job. We know you are behind your graduate, so don’t worry: keep an open mind, and support them as they carve out their own path towards their brilliant career.

Extensive use of labour market information

This book differs from other career handbooks aimed at students and graduates in the extent to which we have included labour market information (LMI), and have given clear advice to readers on how to access and make use of LMI. We recognise that you know your students and their courses and the employment patterns of your graduates, and you know your local and regional labour market. We hope that this handbook, with its broader LMI perspective, will be a useful addition to your practice and a helpful reference for your students.

Working with academic colleagues to share expertise

Strong partnerships with academic colleagues, based on mutual understanding, lead to provision for students which builds on careers advisers’ expertise and tutors’ specialist subject knowledge. Please have a look at our ‘Notes for academic or personal tutors’ for our thoughts about how this handbook might support your academic colleagues – and indeed you yourselves – in the planning and delivery of workshops, seminars and taught modules.

We hope to enhance your existing offer to students

We hope you will find that this handbook enhances the work you do with students and graduates – it certainly isn’t designed to replace it. You will see that we frequently signpost students and graduates to their university careers service. We hope that you will welcome this. While we know that there are differences in style, provision and resources in different universities, we hope you will be able to respond if readers come your way.

Brilliant examples

In this book you will see brilliant examples in most chapters. These quotes are by real students and graduates, drawn from a range of universities and subject disciplines. We also approached people working in small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) because that is an important employment sector. All were kind enough to let us quote their stories and we have used their own words, with their permission. We are very grateful to them for their willingness to share their experiences in this book. We’ve chosen these brilliant examples because they bring to life some of the key messages in this handbook. We also hope that these brilliant examples will inspire and encourage you.

Brilliant quotes

We know that whatever we say, as career guidance professionals, it’s good too for you to hear direct from employers. So we approached two people, with different perspectives, and asked them to tell us what key messages they want graduates to hear. We are very grateful to both of them for their willingness to be included in this way. You’ll see them quoted in most of the chapters in the book, so let us introduce them to you.

Carl Gilleard was for many years the Chief Executive of the Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR). AGR is dedicated to supporting and representing employers in all aspects of graduate recruitment and development. It represents over 800 organisations that, between them, offer a high proportion of graduate opportunities in the UK.

Julian Radley is Financial Director of Evotel Holdings, which supplies televisions to electrical retailers, and operates across the UK, Europe and the Far East. Nearly 60 per cent of private sector employment in the UK is located in small to medium-sized enterprises. Evotel, his highly successful company, is a brilliant example of the kind of SME that is vital to the economy.