That 4th Year Job Hunt!

So you have worked hard since forever to get good grades to get into uni and you finally get here and absolutely love it. Then you suddenly realise that in 12 short weeks your last semester of uni ever (except those doing post-grads) will be over. No more being a student, partying all night, sleeping al day and occasionally going to lectures. Its time to go out there in the big, wide, scary world and get a real job! Not the kind of job you have had before working for minimum wage and taking abuse from everyone but a real proper grown up job. With a salary and a suit and everything!!!

Well that’s the plan anyway. Seeing how our country is in a bit of a meltdown at the moment jobs are not that easy to come by.

A few of my friends who graduated last year are still working in retail jobs because there are no spaces on graduate schemes and just generally no jobs about. Or like me your searching for jobs trying to be all prepared and you find that unless you have an engineering degree, which I don’t, or are a brain surgeon, which I’m very defiantly not, then there really isn’t many jobs about.

Then there are the false hope jobs, the ones that sound brilliant in the advert, you feel you are qualified for and then find out that the job is actually in Dubai or Mongolia or somewhere that you have never heard of and have no intention of ever moving to! There are also those jobs that you really want that sound perfect but then when you read further you find that you need masses of experience for and most graduates just don’t have that kind of expertise. Then there is the heart breaking process of applying for jobs and either just never hearing back from them or getting all excited when you see an email from them just to find you have been rejected. On top of all that there is the massive question of: what do I actually want to do? And when you finally decide on an idea you find that there are no jobs, your not qualified to do the job or that its not even a real career choice (who knew you couldn’t be a career chocolate taster?).

There are however a few tips I have learnt along the way that may make the painful job hunt a little less painful. The first being, get experience. Write to and email as many places you can think of that do the job you want and ask for work experience placements. Most companies will try accommodate you, and sometimes its best to look at smaller companies as they will get less applications for work experience. The experience you gain from doing a placement can mean the difference between you getting a job and not.

Secondly just keep looking, new jobs go up every day and unless you look every day or two then you might miss your perfect job, also try searching with different words as sometimes jobs are called different things but are essentially the same.

Thirdly if there is a job within the company you would like to work for but not the specific job you want to do then its worth applying anyway as it is often possible to work your way up through internal promotion.

Most importantly make sure your C.V is tip top and stands out from the rest, check simple things like spelling as these can let you down before your even considered for an interview. And finally don’t ever give up, keep searching and phoning and pestering people, if you appear keen then they know that you are really serious about the job.

Faye Cawood