Nearly all jobs involve a wide variety of situations and activities, and finding a role aligned with your personal ‘career drivers’ is one of the keys to long term career satisfaction.
The UK graduate employment market is very flexible and a substantial majority of advertised jobs are open to applicants from any discipline. This means the breadth of opportunity for most graduates is huge and an unfocused approach can be both time consuming and ineffective. Time spent thinking about and researching options is likely to be time well spent, and will help to break the inertia and fear that can build up for students who feel they have ‘no idea’ of what kind of job(s) might be interesting for them.
The approaches outlined here offer a variety of starting points to generate ideas and assemble a meaningful list of options that might match your interests, strengths and personal preferences.
Using your degree
Many graduates want to use the knowledge and skills developed through their degree in their work. A good degree in a relevant discipline will help ensure that you have appropriate knowledge, some of the skills needed, and the capacity to learn quickly and grow into the role. The following resources can help you follow-up this line of research.
Starting from your work experience or hobbies
First hand work experience allows you to try out both the content and type of the work, whether paid or unpaid. A summer internship lasting a month or longer can provide you with rich insights in the work itself and the working culture of your host organisation. It is also an opportunity to meet a wider range of people you can ask for advice and support. Even short-term work-shadowing and micro-internship experiences can help you experience different work environments and to test out whether the industry sector and role might offer the kind of opportunities, challenges and projects that you would find interesting.
Assuming you enjoy your work experience, you can generate leads directly linked to the sectors, organisations and roles that you have tried. You can expand your thinking by looking at similar or adjacent fields. Once you have identified possibilities, you can:
- use job descriptions to explore the skills and knowledge required and begin to consider how best to prepare and position yourself for applications;
- examine job profiles, such as those listed on both Prospects and TargetJobs to:
- deepen your understanding of the roles;
- understand whether further study would be useful or necessary;
- find suggestions about ‘adjacent careers’ and alternative roles to consider which require similar skills and knowledge.
Using a similar logic, you can also reflect on what you do in your own time - your hobbies; the clubs and activities you enjoy; what you volunteer to do in your free time. For example, it might be that you:
- enjoy being highly skilled and like to pursue technical mastery needed for success (e.g. in sport or music, or working as a research assistant)
- thrive where the people and environment(s) help you feel engaged and valued (e.g. singing in a choir, being part of a campaign, or putting on a play)
- value being able to see tangible results in the things that you do and the impact that you make (e.g. as an ambassador, fundraiser or volunteer, helping to lead a society or JCR/MCR)
- a motivated to seek out and take on significantly challenging roles for the satisfaction of achieving something that may at first feel out of reach (leading TED-X Oxford; putting on a college ball for 1000 guests; training hard to break into the Blues squad or taking on an extreme challenge to raise money for your favourite charity).
All and any of these can help you to understand the things that drive and sustain your interest, motivation and joy. There may not be a direct link to a career, but there is a genuine opportunity to begin to understand what might fuel your future success.
Remember to dream
You can also gain insights by blocking out real-world constraints and fears and allowing yourself to dream about the possibilities as if there were no barriers in your way.
- Interview your younger self: Was there something you really wanted to do when you were much younger? Even ideas that seem wildly out of reach now can still offer insights into what remains attractive to you and what you hope to achieve.
- Dreams for your future: Take time to look ahead and dream. Try to paint a rich picture for yourself of the work you would do. Don't limit your thinking to what you do in the role(s), but consider also:
- who are the people around you?;
- what is working space like. Indoors or outdoors?; In an office? Is it formal and quiet, or relaxed and perhaps chatty? What are people wearing?
- how you feel about yourself and the results or impact you are able to achieve?
You can use the following prompts to create two or three future scenarios.
- What is your current first choice career?
- If this first choice job or field simply did not exist, what else might you do?
- If there were no constraints, and anything and everything was possible, what would you choose to do?
- Looking five years ahead, what would you most like to have experienced, learned or contributed?
Career planning tests
In the section on building self-awareness we mentioned the use of personality questionnaires to help you understand your personal preferences and the pattern of traits that you tend to use most frequently. Many personality based tools will also generate a long list of options to consider, and these can be a valuable starting point when seeking inspiration. Curiously, it is recommended that companies should be cautious about using personality based tools to make 'selection' decisions because personality on its own is a poor predictor of future performance (see, for example, Barrick & Mount, 1991 and Murphy, 2005). A number of these test and personality tools are listed under External Resources (below).
You may have already used some of these, for example, if you used the Morrisby Test or similar at school. Also, a few companies include a personality questionnaire embedded in their career pages which can be used to understand which of their roles might be the best match for your work style preferences.
The range of career ideas suggested by these tools is still likely to be very varied, with perhaps 20 or 30 different roles suggested. So, when reviewing any results, follow your instincts and use your intuition to choose where to start researching the options that most appeal to you: explore what these roles involve and why each particular option might be a good fit for you.
Browsing and scanning the horizons
Browsing industry sector briefings, our career fair booklets and job boards/vacancy listings needs a degree of focus to be productive. However, once you start to clarify and define for yourself what might be ‘right for you’, your sub-conscious mind can be a powerful ally if you pay attention to your instincts and become aware of what ‘catches your attention’. Potential starting points include:
- The Oxford Guide to Careers, published annually, includes introductions to more than 20 sectors and over 50 alumni profiles as well as recruitment advertisements;
- Employer directories and rankings can be found online. Look for leading graduate employers in listings such as The Times Top 100 and the UK 300, or if you already have a specific industry or professional focus, consider looking at the relevant industry bodies, royal societies and professional institutes for company directories, and rankings and award listings.
- Profiles of DPhils and postdocs who have developed careers outside of academia on research- careers.org
For avid readers, natural networkers and thorough researchers, the ideas outlined in the next section can also all be enlisted as ways to scan the horizon to add to your emergent careers thinking, but it pays to be purposeful and directed with these approaches.
