University of Manchester Careers Blog

Your graduate friends all seem to be posting on Facebook about amazing new careers and colleagues. Your student mates are back at uni scoffing free Welcome Week pizza. How about you, have you been looking for a job but getting nowhere, or maybe you’ve been procrastinating getting started? How are you feeling? Scared, worried, daunted, dejected, broke?

Make today the day you make a fresh start and make a plan!

If you haven’t started

It’s never too late, but you’ll feel better in the long-run if you start as soon as you can, so switch off ‘Bargain Hunt’ and ‘A Place in the Sun’ and make plans.

• Don’t know what you want to do? Make a start with some of the exercises in the careers toolkit in the ‘I don’t know what I want to do’ part of our website. Remember you can have an appointment if you need to talk about it, and we offer telephone and Skype appointments to recent Uni of Manchester graduates who’ve moved away from Manchester.
• Know what you want to do but don’t know where to start? Check out the advice on our Which Career pages, they give you the most important starting points for most major careers together with useful links.

If you need to find (more) places to apply

• CareersLink is our own vacancy system. If you haven’t logged in since graduation you might need to reset your password and/or change your contact email address.
• The ‘find a graduate job’ section of our website covers vacancies, online job boards, agencies, networking, graduate internships, have you considered them all?

If you’ve been applying for jobs but not having any luck

Take a step back and consider if you’re targeting the right roles and applying in the right way.

• If you’re not getting shortlisted first consider if you’ve been applying for jobs you a. really want and b. are qualified for. If you don’t really want to work in sales but are applying because you think you should chances are your lack of enthusiasm is coming across in your application. It’s probably time to have a careers appointment to talk about where you should be focusing your efforts. If you want to job but are unable to meet the criteria in the person specification you might be aiming at the wrong level of job or need to look for some short term experience first to boost your applications. There are many tips for ways to get experience relevant to specific careers in the which career pages. If you need help book an appointment.
• If you think you are applying for the right jobs but not getting shortlisted consider getting advice on your applications. Check out the guidelines on our website. If you’re in Manchester come in to get a draft looked at, if you’ve moved away email us a draft for feedback.
• If you’re getting interviews but not being selected, have you asked for interview feedback? If you have and they made suggestions for improvement have you addressed them? Consider a careers appointment to talk about interviews and how you can improve for next time.
  If you were told that you were only just outperformed by someone else keep going! If you’re doing all the right things it’s just a matter of luck and hopefully something will come up soon.

So stuck you’ve no idea what to do?

Call us for a chat! We’ll see what we can do to help you there and then and book you for an appointment if necessary. We’re here to help, don’t suffer in silence.