University of Manchester Careers Blog

Written by Amanda Conway, Careers Consultant at The Careers Service

As the semester begins, so do the career fairs, events and opportunities designed to help you gain experience and prepare for life after university. If you are not sure about what comes next for you or know where to focus your attention – the Career Readiness stages can help.

What is Career Readiness?

We have identified three broad stages of career readiness that students typically go through on their university journey. These are:

Explore, Prepare & Apply

It is possible to pass through these stages a number of times and not in any particular order. Although, when asked where they were at any one time, the majority of our students could identify with a particular stage.

How does it work?

Career Readiness is a new feature of our careers platform – CareerConnect and is something that you can easily update on your own profile at any time. Just sign into your CareerConnect account, click on “Me” and “Profile” and the Career Readiness question slider will pop up.

Once you have picked your stage, your careers team will then send you messages tailored to the support you need with suggestions for where you could focus your attention.

You’re not alone

It can sometimes feel like other students are securing jobs and further study opportunities. The reality, however, is very different.

When we reviewed our users on CareerConnect last year, almost 40% of students were still at the Explore stage – having not really started thinking about their future yet or were just beginning to explore ideas. Almost 40% were at our Prepare stage, ready to build their experience and skills. Approximately 5% felt stuck and were just not sure about what to do next. Wherever you are, you are not on your own.

What’s next for you?

The personalised Careers Readiness messaging will focus on actions that have been found to make a difference to our former students and graduates, helping them to get where they wanted to be. If you are keen to get started, these tips can set you off in the right direction:

• Be Curious – explore your options, try things out and consider what you are about;
• Connect with others – reach out and communicate with those around you;
• Be Courageous – take action, don’t put things off and bounce back from set-backs if you can.

You don’t have to do everything at once, take your first step with Career Readiness. Want to chat? Send us a message and a member of the team will help to answer your questions.