More Jobs for Graduates!

A recent Skills and Employment Survey by researchers at the Institute of Education shows that graduate jobs are at a record high and unskilled jobs at a record low. The full results will be launched on 20 May and last week the BBC published the first report on this change in the UK labour market.

According to the report, more than a quarter of jobs are now available solely to graduates – this seems to indicate that many more employers in the UK are recognising the skills and qualities a Higher Education degree gives people the chance to develop.

The change is indicative of a shift in the country’s economy towards a more skills based economy and a move away from unskilled jobs. This is a major shift from the situation for example in the 1980s where only one in 10 jobs required a degree level qualification.

This change doesn’t only affect full time jobs, in fact part time workers have seen the proportion of jobs available to unqualified workers fall by more than half since the mid-1980s

The report also shows that the number of people who are ‘under-employed’ i.e. graduates in non-graduate level jobs is falling year on year, meaning that more people with degree who find employment are likely to find it at the right level.

What this report does not address is those who do not find employment in the first place. It only looks at those graduates who are in a job at the moment.

Overall this is good news for graduates, it means less chance of under-employment, it means employers understand the value of a degree better, it means that there is a growing availability in jobs for graduates, and it means that your degree put you in a great position for jobs that come up. What is doesn’t mean is that there are more jobs out there. It shows a positive development for the future of the UK economy, but competition is still fierce, therefore it’s very important to think about your skills from an employer’s perspective, what is it about you that makes you a good graduate? How have you made the most of your University experience? How can you demonstrate the skills that you have developed and how they transfer to this particular post?

Those are just a few of the question to ask yourself when starting an application process, and don’t forget if you need any help with applications, interviews, CV writing and making the most of developing your Employability during your degree, contact the Careers Team on careers@cumbria.ac.uk with your questions and we’ll be happy to help!

Hello Diigo - Goodbye Delicious!

After reviewing for some while the development of delicious.com since it was sold on by Yahoo, the University of Cumbria Careers Service has decided to use diigo.com as its main website for useful links.  Our links will be stored at the specific url http://www.diigo.com/user/uoccareers.  Here's a quick screenshot to show roughly what it looked like earlier today:

Hold On - What's All This About?

If you're not familiar with the likes of diigo and delicious, they are both social bookmarking sites.  Anyone can sign up for an account and use it to save web references that interest them - although in the case of diigo, you can do much more, e.g, annotate or highlight text within the referenced webpages.  A bit like Google bookmarks, they have the advantage that, unlike IE favourites or similar, you can view them from any computer.  An extra advantage over Google bookmarks is that anyone else can view them  too, if you have allowed public access to your bookmarks.

Because of the vast explosion of careers and job information on the internet, many University Careers Services make use of them to reference the vast amount of online information likely to be relevant to their clients.  For example, the University of Cumbria currently has 2055 web pages bookmarked on diigo - far too many to even consider putting on a "Useful Links" section of a website. Most services use delicious or diigo but there are others, and the University of London have their own dedicated bookmarking site, Careers Tagged

The key trick is that the use of tags means that it is possible to pick out links according to a key theme or area of interest, rather than browsing all of our links to find if there's anything useful to you.  So you get  exactly those weblinks that are relevant to your needs - more or less.  You can see the precise tags below each web reference in the screenshot.

OK, So How Do I Use This Stuff?

If you visit http://www.diigo.com/user/uoccareers you can pick out the tags that will interest you and search on them in the box at the top (next to Careers Adviser's Public Library).  Or simply type the first few letters of a word you want to search on and diigo will bring up all the possibilities in a dropdown box.  Alternatively just click on any tag beneath a weblink or in the "Top Tags" list and diigo will bring up all the bookmarks bearing that tag.

Then click on the link to bring it up in your browser, or use the 'preview' facility to get a taste of what's on that page.  If you have too many links using one tag, you can narrow things down by selecting another.

You can also retrieve links by modifying the main link to the uoccareers section of diigo in a url web address.  So http://www.diigo.com/user/uoccareers/cv will bring up all the links tagged 'CV' and  http://www.diigo.com/user/uoccareers/internship will bring up all the stuff on internships, etc.

Useful isn't it?

Sites like diigo offer you a vast amount of information at your fingertips and weed out a lot of the chaff you would get by just googling the themes you want.  It's surprising then that most students report that they have not heard of this sort of site, let alone used them, or set up their own accounts.  All we can say is - give it a try!

University of Cumbria students can find a more detailed guide about using diigo on the Jobs&Careers tab on Blackboard (see 'Plan Your Career' section).  If you should find any dead links on http://www.diigo.com/user/uoccareers - or if you would like to suggest some new ones - please feel free to contact us on careers@cumbria.ac.uk

Impressive careers information

Have you had a look at the National Career Service website lately?car
No? Well as a self-confessed careers information nerd I have!
And it's pretty impressive.
Careers information databases like this one and Prospects (the UK's official graduate careers website) are a great starting point for researching your job ideas.
Not only do they give you a summary of what the job involves, skills and qualifications needed, routes in as well as pay, but the further information section is great at taking your research that bit further by giving you links to industry bodies and key organisations.
This sort of exploration can lead you to ideas for work experience, key job vacancy sites, interesting courses and application and interview advice - for the job area that interests you.
Much better than Googling!

Graduate Careers Advice On Video

An interesting development over the past few months has been the continuing rise of careers information resources using video based material.

The latest contributor offering graduate careers advice by video is Career Player but they are certainly not the first and you can find some earlier samples we have saved for the benefit of University of Cumbria Students and Graduates at http://www.delicious.com/skillzone/video

Whether it's any better than what you can find in your local lending library or on sites like Prospects is for you to decide... but video careers information looks like it's here to stay.

Next Steps Replacing Jobs4U?

News from the Careers Information front has emerged that the jobs4u database, which has not been updated since June, has effectively been archived. A Direct.gov site (see http://ow.ly/4srBP) points users instead to the Next Step database.

For non careers-techies who may be wondering about the implications of this, Next Step was originally a careers information system targetted at adult learners developed via Learndirect, whereas jobs4u was the system used by the connexions service and was specifically for young people.

The Next Step articles are perfectly adequate introductions to the careers covered and written in a slightly less formal style than the parallel jobs4u. However, the jobs4u articles contained more sophisticated information and the open question is whether the Next Step article format will be adjusted to cover the same scope.

Dinosaur careers advisers such as myself can also recall that jobs4u was derived from the "Careers Officers' Handbook" (COH) by the former organisation COIC, after it became part of the former Manpower Services Commission. As the title suggests, COH, originally developed by Careers Advisers in the London area for their own use, was the national information handbook used by Careers Advisers everywhere as a basic research resource when working with young people.

The cynics among us might wonder where Careers Advisers will now get their information from. Or maybe all they need to do is refer everyone to careers websites?