Career Connect

Supporting taught postgraduate students

The academic year is coming to an end here at Edinburgh with students busy handing in final assignments for their courses, studying for exams, and then the final exam period. For those of you studying online, who may be juggling study with other commitments, it may also be a time when the pressure on your time begins to ease for a while and you think of taking a vacation.

You often read that people spend more time planning for a vacation than they do planning a career. Think of the amount of time you spend checking out flights or making other travel plans, finding the right hotel or accommodation, reading about all the places you’d like to visit when you get there…wherever that may be. And that’s just for a two week vacation! Compare that to the amount of time you spend thinking about your career development considering you may spend 35 hours a week at work (or more) possibly over the course of 40 years!

So if you’re taking a break from academic commitments in the next few months maybe this is a good time to reflect on your studies and consider how they could influence the direction you take in your future career. To help you, check out our Supporting taught postgraduate students resource. There is information to help you to reflect on your studies, consider what you want to achieve, encourage you to set goals, and to think about the next step once you complete your postgraduate degree. Most of us don’t hesitate to make the time to plan a good vacation. Take a similar approach to ensure you make satisfying career choices.

Sponsors versus Mentors for Career Development

January 9, 2017

The People Who Can Open More Career Doors Than You Ever Thought Possible

I’m a big fan of mentoring for individuals to help them with their career development. Mentors tend to be someone you can talk to about your plans, set goals with, and get ideas and encouragement from on how to achieve those goals. Often mentors come from within your organisation (if you are employed) and they’re usually more senior than you, although occasionally people may seek out a mentor from outside their organisation (maybe from a sector they are keen to move into). Mentors can be motivating, supportive, help clarify ideas, and give you a different (and helpful!) perspective on the issues you may be facing in your job or in progressing your career.

But I recently came across a really interesting blog post from a few years ago that I wanted to share with you. It suggests enlisting the help of a ‘sponsor’ to support your career development, someone who will actively promote your career development within an organisation. I’ve copied a quote from the post below.

But what’s the difference between a mentor and a sponsor? Heather Foust-Cummings, a vice president with Catalyst Research Center for Equity in Business Leadership, explained it this way: “A mentor will talk with you, but a sponsor will talk about you.”

The blog talks about what you can do to enlist the support of a sponsor and why it’s a good thing to do. I’d recommend it as a really interesting read if you want to progress your career with your current employer.

Annual reviews in employment: how to get the most of out them

September 27, 2016

Career Management Skill development No Comments

Annual review, performance review, appraisal, or some other name. Whatever they are called, they are typically a yearly meeting, usually between an employee and their line manager, to reflect on the employee’s progress within their job within the previous year and to set objectives for the following year. Many of our distance learning students are working full-time while studying so will probably encounter annual reviews.

In many organisations the annual review is performance-related and linked to salary so there’s some pressure to do well. But for everyone, the review is an opportunity to reflect on what’s gone well over the year, what hasn’t gone well and why, to consider where you want to go with your role in the future, and what training or development support would help you succeed in your role. The review can be used to support your long term career development goals if you prepare for it well and approach it properly.

Set your work objectives for the year but ask for opportunities to gain experience in areas that interest you. Think about skills you want to develop or improve and what work opportunities may give you a chance to do this. Think about how this could help meet specific business objectives as well as your own interests as you will present a more persuasive argument.

Is your current course of study related in any way to your job? If yes, make sure you talk about what you are learning and how it has influenced (positively I hope!) your work. Have you developed new knowledge or skills that you could share with your reviewer and suggest ways you could use them in your current role, to broaden your experience and benefit your employer at the same time.

Be open to constructive feedback on your performance. Ask for suggestions about what you could do better, and what support may be available to help you do this. Discuss possible solutions to barriers you have faced in your role. Use this as an opportunity to get guidance rather than being defensive about any negative comments or work issues.

What training could be useful to help you do your job and progress? It’s worth identifying suitable training opportunities before your review and discussing them with your reviewer, again thinking about how this training could help you contribute more effectively to set objectives.

If you prepare effectively for your review, and engage positively with the process you will hopefully have a productive, developmental conversation which will help you move forward in your career.

Flexible working

May 26, 2016

Flexible working patterns have become common in recent years. This has been a result of both employee requests to amend working hours, in order to achieve a better balance between their work and home life; and also employers efforts to meet the needs of their customer and staff. Within the UK, all employees who have worked for their employer for 26 weeks continuously can request that a change to their working hours be given consideration. My colleague Lindsey McLeod provides an insight below:

Flexible working is something that you may want to consider when looking at your career planning. A great resource to understand what rights you have when it comes to Flexible Working is the ACAS website which gives a detailed breakdown of policies and processes involved in flexible working.

The benefits of flexible working are often talked about, achieving a better work/life balance, more efficient working whilst carrying out your employee duties but there are also arguments to the contrary, such as the pressures to deliver more in a shorter time that some flexible workers place on themselves. Often flexible working is associated with mothers returning to work, but flexible working isn’t aimed at solely this demographic. Working Families.org aim to increase the visibility and viability of flexible working for all. A particular focus they have this year in Scotland is increasing the potential for flexible working for Fathers, in the Year of the Dad. They recently held their Awards on the 10^th March for the best Flexible Working employers. Check out their upcoming National Work Life Week campaign.

It is worth speaking to your Line Manager and HR department, or checking the wording of a job advertisement if you aren’t currently employed, to establish where and how flexible working could be incorporated into your place of work. Look out for this logo:

Reflecting on your Values

February 18, 2016

Career Management Events No Comments

Welcome to Innovative Learning Week – day 4

Deciding on your preferred future career direction is often a challenging process. There will be a number of factors which will influence your conclusion, including what is important to you and what will give you satisfaction in your next role. My colleague Lizzie Mortimer suggests an exercise to help you to reflect on your personal values and to identify which are most significant for you.

When did you last take some time to reflect on your values?

Our values play an important part in career decision making. Identifying what is important to us at a given stage in our life will help us assess whether a current or future role is a good fit for us.

In the book ‘Build your own Rainbow’ Hopson and Scally set forth an exercise to help individuals consider what their values are – and rank them in to levels of importance.

Try it for yourself:

Label 5 columns: Very Important, Important, Quite Important, Of Some Importance, Not Important
Using the list of values below, arrange them in to appropriate columns for you
Add more values if you want to
N.B. Hopson and Scally suggest that if you have more than seven or eight in the Very Important column, you haven’t been discriminating enough.
You now have a tool you can use to analyse your current position or situation, and future possibilities
As an extended activity, rearrange the cards the way you would have five or ten years ago – what has changed?

List of values

VALUE or MOTIVATOR
A well-known organisation: you like being part of a well-known organisation.
Artistic: you enjoy work involving drawing, designing, making music, making models, etc.
Being Expert: you like being known as someone with special knowledge or skills.
Challenge: you enjoy being ‘stretched’ and given new problems to work on.
Communication: you enjoy being able to express ideas well in writing or in speech.
Community: you like to live in a place where you can get involved in the community.
Competition: you enjoy competing against other people or groups.
Contact with people: you enjoy having a lot of contact with people.
Creativity: thinking up new ideas and ways of doing things is important to you.
Excitement: it is important for you to have a lot of excitement in your work.
Fast pace: you enjoy working rapidly at a high pace.
Friendship: you would or do like close friendships with people at work.
Help society: you like to think that your work is producing something worthwhile for society.
Helping others: it is important to you to help other people, either individually or in groups, as part of your work.
Independence: you like being able to work in the way you want, without others telling you what to do.
Learning: it is important for you to learn new things.
Making decisions: it is important to you to have to make decisions about how things should be done, who should do it and when it should be done.
Money: earning a large amount of money is important to you.
Peace: you prefer to have few pressures or uncomfortable demands.
Persuading people: you enjoy persuading people to buy something or change their minds about something.
Physical challenge: you enjoy doing something that is physically demanding.
Place of work: it is important that you work in the right part of the country for you.
Precise work: you like working at things which involve great care and concentration.
Pressure: you like working to deadlines.
Promotion: you like to work where there is a good chance of promotion.
Recognition: you do like people to appreciate you for the work you do.
Risk: you like to take risks.
Routine: you like a work routine which is fairly predictable.
Security: it is important to know your work will always be there for you.
Status: you enjoy being in a position which leads other people to respect you.
Supervision: you enjoy being responsible for work done by others.
Time Freedom: you prefer to be able to choose your own times for doing things, not having rigid working hours.
Variety: you enjoy having lots of different things to do.
Work alone: you like to work on your own.
Work with others: you like to work in a team alongside others.

This material is drawn from Build Your Own Rainbow – a workbook for career and life management by Barrie Hopson and Mike Scally, published by Management Books 2000 Ltd.

ã Lifeskills International 1996

Achieve the salary you deserve

January 11, 2016

Researching careers No Comments

The money maestros at Save the Student suggest a plan to get you what you’re worth. Ruth Bushi takes a look at how to make your career pay.

Pick a path

Salaries on offer can vary enormously. Even new graduate starting salaries are like the proverbial piece of string: right now, salaries for UK graduates fall anywhere between 16 grand and a whopping £70k.

Interestingly, it’s not just about studying ‘the right’ subjects, but also which career path you follow. Use an English degree for journalism and you could be looking at as little as £12,000 in your first year of work. Switch to teaching and you could almost double that. Or jump ship entirely for Aldi’s grad training scheme and you could drive away – in a company car – with £42k.

Whatever you study, there could be a career path out there littered with fast cars, big money and international travel. In reality, while there are routes and roles that could earn you a bit more, the smart advice is picking things you enjoy, make you happy and want to do for the long term. If you’re more likely to work hard because you love your job, the pay can catch up – but only you can decide which is more important (and focus on nailing it).

Know your worth

Researching your chosen industry, pay scales and career progression is a no-brainer but, as well as helping you pick a vocation, it can show where you fit into the bigger picture when you start applying for jobs.

What do other graduates / professionals in your field get paid for similar roles? Look at salary surveys and job profiles to get an idea of starting pay – (perhaps start with the Careers Service’s guide to occupations)
Does your field pay more for specialist training or experience, and would it help if you got some? Is your postgraduate degree addressing this? A career mentor can help if you need insider advice. (Connect.ed on the Careers tab on your MyEd portal is one way to find alumni who may be able to help.)
Do your skills deserve a premium? Are you missing any essential criteria (and can you get them)? Read job ads, including more senior roles, to see what training or experience could boost your pay.
Double-check the salary on the job description (or call ahead and ask for it). Will the money cover your living costs – how will you manage if it doesn’t?
If the money’s nothing to write home about, do the company, colleagues and opportunities make it a good investment anyway? Whatever your ‘spidey sense’ tells you – listen to it.

Stand out from the crowd

It stands to reason that the bigger the talent pool, the slimmer the salaries on offer. If you’ve got your heart set on a popular and not overly specialised career, lower wages can be the trade-off (film and TV ‘runners’ are often paid nothing when they start out because there’s no shortage of candidates jumping at the bit). Training and experience can help you leapfrog your way up the career ladder: the higher you get on, the more you’re likely to earn.

Get networking – locally or online (you can even look at profiles of people you rate on LinkedIn) – to find out what qualities folk at the top have capitalised on, and ask how they got them.

Ask for more

Once you’ve got a job offer on the table, check that the salary is fair, reasonable, and matches what you’re bringing to the party (have another look at ‘Know your worth’ above). If it isn’t, this is the perfect time to ask for a bit more.

Here are some tips that can help:

Ask to see the salary range before you apply: there’s little point for asking for something way beyond the company purse
Know the going rate for your industry (start with the links in ‘Pick a Path’) so you’ve got a clear idea of what to ask for
Make a strong case for why you deserve more, especially any experience, skills, training or solutions you’re bringing to the company
If the pay doesn’t reflect the location (and commuting costs or rent as a result), you could ask for something to cover the extra expense of getting to work.

The salary offered often isn’t as high as it could be simply because people just don’t ask. Women are even less likely to negotiate (and also likely to earn less over their careers than men doing similar roles). Either way, it’s important to learn how to negotiate effectively.

Don’t forget the full package

If your employer can’t offer you any more cash, it’s always worth finding out what else could sweeten the deal:

Training, whether on the job or externally certified, can boost your net worth later on
Health insurance or gym membership
Perks, from company cars to time-out for volunteering
Their pension scheme (it’s always good to plan longer term!)

You might also want to find out how soon you can pitch for promotion or a pay rise.

Salaries, like house prices, usually go up over time – even without a career plan or Mafia-style negotiation skills. Knowing what you want can certainly help you earn more – but big bucks aren’t the be-all of working life. Finding something you enjoy, learning cool stuff and working with fun people can all be worth just as much. Also be aware that your attitude to work and your colleagues can do just as much to inflate your salary as your CV can.

It’s often good to take the long term view. If you wring the most out of your opportunities – financial or otherwise – you’ll get the bigger pay-off.

Happy hunting!

Land a job in space – a fantasy or possibility?

December 18, 2015

When running career planning workshops at the Edinburgh campus, we sometimes ask students to think about their ‘fantasy’ job. What type of job would they love to have if there were absolutely no barriers of any kind to hold them back?

As you can imagine this tends to elicit a wide range of replies from a leading international researcher, to travel writer, to beach café owner, to United Nations negotiator. One career option mentioned from time to time which seems particularly topical at present is an astronaut!

I suspect that space travel will not appeal to that many of you – even if you followed Tim Peake, Britain’s first official astronaut, on his journey to the international Space Station. However, when I came across a Recruitment Grapevine article “What candidates need to land a job in space” I felt that I had to share it with you.

Aspiring space travelers will need a Bachelor’s degree (engineering, biological science, physical science, computer science, or mathematics), and at least three years-worth of related, progressively responsible, professional experience obtained after degree completion or at least 1,000 hours pilot-in-command time in a jet aircraft. They also need to be highly intelligent – the average Apollo astronaut has an IQ of 136 – and not too tall!

Inspired? You can find more at: Recruitment Grapevine

My real reason for sharing this however is that if you are rethinking your future career direction, a little time spent reflecting on your own ‘fantasy’ job could offer more than just a bit of fun. It can also be a good way to tap into what’s really important to you – what interests you, what you feel passionate about and what you value. Thinking about yourself and your own priorities is a good first step when career planning … and perhaps your fantasy will be more realistic than you first think!

For further career planning inspiration have a look at the Careers Service website: Figuring out your career

Enjoy your fantasy!

Managing your postgraduate journey

December 1, 2015

Career Management Skill development No Comments

Studying for a postgraduate award through online learning allows a lot of flexibility but most students are balancing their studies with other commitments such as work or family. As a result we find that students often report their studies as a very intensive time and welcome support that will enable them to engage with their studies more effectively (and in a time efficient way!).

The Careers Service and the Institute of Academic Development have developed a new resource, Supporting taught postgraduates, to help taught postgraduate students to engage quickly and effectively with their studies. The resources provide support during your programme to help you to achieve academically, and take opportunities for career enhancement, and to support you to make and realise successful career decisions. It pulls together a lot of information that is scattered around other parts of the University website and ensures it is directly relevant for postgraduate students. Covering topics such as academic writing, time management, critical thinking, and career planning, we hope it will be of use to you as you continue your studies at the University.

You can get an overview of the topics covered in the image below or go directly to the website.

Supporting taught postgraduates

Researching occupations and employment sectors

November 4, 2015