Adzuna and Milkround’s Graduate of the Year Competition 2013

Graduates! It’s back! And this time it is bigger and better than ever before. Adzuna has teamed up with top graduate website Milkround to bring you “Graduate of the Year 2013.” Together we are offering you the chance to win a JOB, some CASH and a foot in the door.

The rest is up to you!

1.                An internship with a top UK company (including eBay, L’Oreal, Sony & Google)

2.                A cash prize of £1000

3.                A CV clinic with a top UK entrepreneur

4.                The Illustrious Crown of “Graduate of the Year”

 

The UK employment market is tougher than ever, especially for graduates fresh and eager from university. Competition for graduate positions continues to rise in the UK with over 50 applicants for every available graduate job. Unemployment among 18-25 year olds is the highest it’s been for decades and graduates are finding it tougher than ever to land an entry level position. But there are glimmers of hope in the market, with top employment companies Milkround and Adzuna teaming up to launch a nationwide campaign to find Britain’s “Graduate of the Year 2013”.
If you are a recent or soon-to-be graduate from a recognised UK university then we want to hear from you. We are looking for the brightest, sparkiest, gutsiest individual around.  Whether you excel in arts, music, sports, academia, languages or are an outstanding student union member, leader, or social contributor, we want to hear about you and why you deserve to win.
To enter go to Graduate of the Year 2013 and tell us briefly why you think you are worthy of this magnificent prize.  Deadline is 1st July 2013 and the overall winner will be announced at the Award Ceremony on the 1st August 2013.

Don’t believe us, check out the success of last year’s winner Leo Anthias. Following his internship at Passion Capital, Leo has since gone on to found his own company, Verse (making PowerPoint collaboration painless).

Remember not everyone can be a winner but that doesn’t mean you can’t land your dream job too.  Check out our blog for great interview tips, stellar advice for graduates, thousands of graduate jobs, internships and more vacancies than you can shake a stick at.

Join the chat on twitter: #graduateoftheyear

Career Ahead - University of Cumbria's Employability Award

Career Ahead is now coming to the end of its first year and it is with great pride that I have seen the accomplishments of our students developing their employability skills through an amazing array of activities. From bar jobs and shop work to volunteering with St. John's ambulance, student ambassador work and student mentoring while successfully continuing with their academic studies.

The Award has provided students who participate in extra-curricular activity the opportunity to pull all their experience together, providing evidence of attending workshops, coaching, voluntary and paid work to develop an e-portfolio which show-cases their skills to prospective employers.

The Award enables students to make the most of their university experience, to increase their employability skills and provide a method of evidencing their activities outside their university course. Consequently, students are not only developing their skills but also they are learning how to promote themselves through practical experiences such as paid/volunteer work, training, workshops and sports etc.

Elements of the Award consist of personal development - reflecting on what skills you have and what skills you need to develop further in order to get the job you want. Developing 4 key employability skills while taking part in 100+ hours of extra curricular activity throughout your time at university. Job searching, completing a job application form, developing a CV and attending a mock interview are all elements of the Award that develop skills helping students find their ideal job when they graduate.

We now have students that have completed the Award and it really is inspiring to see the dedication and effort that these students have put in to developing their e-portfolios. These students are the ones's that will be ready when they graduate to tackle the jobmarket, they will have all the skills that you need to get the jobs, they will stand out from the crowd because they put that extra bit of effort in while they were at university. I therefore want to applaud those students and congratulate them for completing the Award and hope that other students realise not only the importance of developing their employability skills but also realise their own potential to achieve their career goals and realise their dreams.

Well done and congratualtions!

For students interested in knowing more about career Ahead taking please email me, Libby, at careerahead@cumbria.ac.uk

Are These The Jobs of The Future?

Some careers advisers have a distinct penchant for digging out obscure pieces of careers information and labour market trends.  However, I doubt if many will have perused the full 260 odd pages of the "Skill Shortage Sensible" report produced by the Migration Advisory Committee of the Home Office.  It does however contain a handy (if still considerable) list of the occupations the Committee recommend for retention in the shortage occupation list for the UK and Scotland.

In other words, it is a good guide to job areas in which UK citizens as well as immigrants to the country may themselves find opportunities in the future and may repay some further study.  Of course some of the
jobs are very high level occupations that would not be immediately within the grasp of the average graduate - but we would hope that least some of those who have sought careers advice at the University of Cumbria will harbour longer-term ambitions.

It might come as little surprise that many of the items on the list contain the word engineering at some point and some of the key disciplines that get several mentions are:

• nuclear decommissioning and waste management (so good news here for the sons and daughters of West Cumbria)
• electricity distribution and transmission
• tunnelling and landfill
• 'all chemical engineers'
• aerospace manufacture
• oil and gas

The continuing need for oil and gas extraction also accounts for a further sub-family of anticipated shortage applications incuding geologists, hydrogeologists, geochemists, geophysicists and pipe welders as well as a wide number of engineering technical specialisms.

If you've spotted that you can't study many of these areas at the University of Cumbria, there is better news coming.  The shortage recommendation list includes a number of occupations relating to 2D/3D computer animation for film, televison and video games, including artists, modellers and production specialists as well as dancers and musicians.  

Health occupations are also well represented, notably:

• hospital doctors in haeomotology, emergency medicine, paediatrics, old age psychiatry, anaesthetics, intensive care, internal medicine and accident and emergency
• diagnostic and therapeutic radiographers
• operating theatre nurses
• social workers in children's and family services (interestingly in the light of current vacancy shortages locally)
• nuclear medicine and radiotherapy phycisists

Lastly, secondary teachers of biology, chemistry and physics as well as chefs also receive a mention.

Currently the shortage occupation list is reviewed every two years - the so-called sunset clause.

Graduate Jobs Market On The Turn?

According to the Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services website a recent survey of Heads of University Careers Services showed some optimistic results on graduate job prospects. The vast majority (90%) of careers bosses surveyed in the last quarter of 2012 felt that the graduate labour market was either becoming more buoyant or at least getting no worse.  80% felt that the position was better or about the same as in the same quarter of 2011.

Finance, construction and engineering were all quoted as areas that were recruiting graduates heavily. Notably some IT and engineering firms starting to have difficulty filling vacancies, and smaller businesses were finding it hard to compete with the salaries and prospects offered by larger companies.

While this all fits in with the overall reduction in unemployment reported in the papers, less good news is that opportunities for graduates in the public sector, on which many University of Cumbria students are largely dependent, have continued to decline, while full-time vacancies are being replaced by part-time jobs and internships.

Any improvement in the graduate labour market must of course be good news but the sad truth is that it probably doesn't make a great deal of difference to many graduates from Cumbria, who are basically faced with the "Shall I stay or shall I go?" question.  Either they pursue attractive job adverts elsewhere, or put up with the more limited prospects available in their home area.

FAQ: How can I go about looking for a job?

This is the second in our series of answers to frequently asked questions:

How can I go about looking for a job?

First, have you remembered the ‘University of Cumbria Job Shop’? 

1. Access the main page - http://cumbria.prospects.ac.uk
   
2. Press ‘Register Now’.
   
3. Create a user name and fill in your details.  Once Registered:
    
4. Select ‘Search for Vacancies’ in the ‘Main Menu’ on dashboard to access jobs by type, sector and location.
    
5. Sign up to receive email job alerts (optional).
    
   
6. To search for specific employers, type the employer name in ‘Keyword’ box.
   
   
7. Simples!

For more jobsearching tips, see the careers section on The University of Cumbria website.

Help for Newly Qualified Teachers

The job situation for Newly Qualified Teachers (NQTs) has slowly been worsening over the past few years and even highly skilled leavers are now having to fight hard to find the right opportunity in some parts of the country.

With this in mind we have used our account on delicious.com to gather together a 'stack' of key links that are likely to be helpful to NQTs in their search for work. You can view them at http://delicious.com/stacks/view/INRflp and we hope they help our own and other students to break into the teaching profession.

Incidentally, you can view stacks on an increasing number of key related themes by looking up http://www.delicious.com/stacks/skillzone

Mini Careers Fair At Fusehill Street Campus

Here is some slightly delayed news from employers who attended this event, which took place in the Gateway on 2nd May:

Hays Recruitment

Full and part time work opportunities for students and graduates including reception, administration, project support and project management. Employers include NHS, schools and colleges, Riverside Housing, Cumbria County Council and manufacturing companies such as James Walker and Northern Food.

Event Guides

Have short term summer work on sales support on event publications and three permanent graduate vacancies.

Inspira
Recruiting summer volunteers for National Citizenship Service, working with 13-19 year olds.

Carlisle Youth Zone

Have volunteer and part-time roles working with children and young people.

Nestle, Dalston

Graduate scheme and quality assurance roles on offer. Looking mainly for candidates from science/technology backgrounds.

Wetherspoons Careers Recruitment Day - Carlisle

Hot Press news is that Pub Chain J. D. Wetherspoon are holding a Careers Recruitment Day at Lloyds No 1 Bar Carlisle on Wednesday 29th February between 10.00 am and 4. 00 pm.

A poster on the bar in Lloyds invites applicants for posts as bar and kitchen staff as well as Trainee Managers.  Simply turn up on the day or apply via the Wetherspoon Jobs website if you can't make it.

It's not clear from the site if, as with their various festivals, other branches of 'Spoons are running a similar event on the same date.

Vacancies Across the Border

At a time when neither graduates looking to start their career - nor new students looking for part-time work - are having an easy time, there is at least some encouraging news with a little spate of vacancies being advertised in the Dumfriesshire area.

Here are some links to those that may be of interest:

http://www.talkatlas.co.uk/recruitment.html
Atlas Communications

http://www.dghp.org.uk/admin/current-vacancies
Dumfries and Galloway Housing Partnership

http://www.spectrum-care.com
Home Carers (Dumfries) - contact direct for application details

http://www.aberlour.org.uk/vacancylisting.aspx
Aberlour Trust

http://www.sppa.org.uk/job_vacancies/sppa_vacancies.html
Scottish Pre-School Play Association

www.myjobscotland.gov.uk
Youth Information Worker (Dumfries)

The last is a particularly useful resource as it covers Local Authority jobs across the whole of Scotland.

IT Job Market Continues to Improve

Demand for candidates with ICT skills in the UK now outstrips supply, according to Sector Skills Council e-skills.

The latest Labour Market Bulletin from e-skills shows that the number of advertised vacancies for ICT staff rose for the fifth consecutive quarter to a total of 101,000 positions, while the unemployment rate for ICT staff fell to 3.1% as opposed to 8.3% for the workforce as a whole.

This news tallies with the large number of graduate vacancies being advertised recently at cumbria.prospects.ac.uk

For a closer look at the IT labour market, visit www.e-skills.com/Research/Research-publications/Labour-Market-Bulletin to download the full version of the Bulletin.

BUPA Predicts Care Shortfall

Private health and social care organisation BUPA forecasts that 100,000 old people may not be able to have access to care home places over the next ten years.

The BUPA report "Who Cares" claims that Local Authority cutbacks in this period will lead to a shortage of 81,000 care home beds, leading to largescale bed blocking in the NHS because of the resulting increase in elderly hospital admissions.

The report also makes a plea for the ringfencing of £2 billion allocated to Local Authority provision for adult social care by 2014-15, before going on to provide a full review of the funding of adult care provision.

The fact that a private organisation is showing concern about public sector cutbacks they might be expected to benefit from becomes more comprehensible when you realise that 70% of BUPA care home residents are in receipt of state funding. Presumably many receive Local Authority funding as well.

It can however only be bad news for graduates and others who are looking to make their career in the care sector over the next few years.

Read the full report at
www.epolitix.com/fileadmin/epolitix/stakeholders/BUPA_Who_Cares.pdf

Note: I first found it through a tweet @social_care which looks a good source for those interested in developments in Social Care provision.

Jobsites in Scotland

If you are looking for work North of the Border, here are some sites you may find useful:

• www.s1jobs.com
  
• www.scottishjobs.com
• www.monsterscotland.co.uk
• www.stvjobs.com
• www.myjobscotland.gov.uk

Marketing Jobs on the Up?

Graduate Prospects' magazine "Jobs and Courses" reports a 26% rise in recruitment to Marketing vacancies in 2010, as surveyed by the Reed Marketing Job Index.

Unfortunately, this has not lead to an increase in Graduate salary levels but is never theless encouraging news. You can view the full article in the January edition of Jobs and Courses.

Graduate Recruitment Trends

Some good news from a recent survey:

- The UK¹s leading employers are expecting to increase their graduate recruitment by 9.4% in 2011 and three-fifths of employers expect to recruit more graduates in 2011 whilst a quarter plan to maintain their intake at 2010 levels.

- The leading accountancy & professional services firms are intending to hire almost 10% more graduates than in 2010, an increase of more than 350 trainees year-on-year. There will also be substantial increases to the graduate intake at the City¹s top investment banks (up 12.2% compared to 2010) and the high street banks (up 24.8%).

- The largest recruiters of graduates in 2011 will be PricewaterhouseCoopers (1,200 vacancies), Deloitte (1,000 vacancies), KPMG (900 vacancies), the Teach First scheme (780 vacancies) and Ernst & Young (740 vacancies).

- A quarter of top graduate programmes will pay new recruits a starting salary of more than £30,000 when they begin work and seven organisations are offering at least £40,000 to this year¹s graduates. Public sector employers (average of £22,200), retailers (average of £24,000) and engineering & industrial companies (average of £24,500) have the lowest graduate pay rates for 2011.

- Three-fifths of employers are providing industrial placements for undergraduates (typically for 6-12 months) or vacation work lasting more than three weeks. However, nearly two-thirds of recruiters caution that graduates who have had no previous work experience at all are unlikely to be successful during the selection process and have little or no chance of receiving a job offer for their organisation's graduate programmes.

Source: Highflyers

An Invitation from the University of Cumbria

“What Employers Want” - Top Tips for Getting That Job
25th January 2011

You are invited to a day to help you get your graduate career started


Venue F26, First Floor, Skiddaw Buidling, Carlisle Campus, Fusehill St, University of Cumbria CA1 2HH


9.30am – 10.00am Coffee, registration, welcome

10.00am – 10.45am Job Opportunities For You - Jo Tate & Christina Gash (Knowledge Transfer Partnership)

10.45am – 11am Coffee break

11.00am – 11.45am What Employers Want, What Employers Don’t Want! - Adrian Charlton, AW Communication

11.45am – 12.30pm Paid Placements for You, Unite With Business - Pippa Greenwood, Steve Minto

12.30pm – 1.30pm Lunch

1.30pm – 2.30pm Assessing Your Skills for Graduate Management Training Schemes. Workshop - Emma Grant, Enterprise Rent-A-Car

2.30pm – 3.15pm Starting Your Own Business – one University of Cumbria graduate’s experiences. - Leo White, Hydrant

3.15pm – 3.30pm Coffee break

3.30pm – 4.30pm CV Clinic – Make Your CV Work For You. Bring Your CV and Make It Happen - Sarah Fox

IF YOU WISH TO ATTEND PLEASE EMAIL SARAH FOX sarah.fox@cumbria.ac.uk
PUTTING 25TH JANUARY IN THE SUBJECT LINE.

What are IT companies looking for?

Some answers came out from a recent careers adviser meeting with four major companies:

Technical Skills

SAP / ERP technologies, methodologies such as Agile, languages such as .NET and C#. If you can demonstrate a good grasp of a language like Java you can probably pick up other languages quite easily.

Communication, influencing and the ability to self-market seem to be as important as numerical and technical skills.

Degree Classification

A bit of a split - about half of the companies recruiting stipulate a 2.1 Not very positive about PhD students but a masters in some sort of IT conversion course can be good if students demonstrate passion for IT.

Time to Apply Yourself?

New Year is a signal to forthcoming graduates to start applying for vacancies as deadline dates are notified with increasing regularity.

University of Cumbria students and graduates and others looking for work in the area can register to search for vacancies and prospective employers across the North West at www.prospects.ac.uk/pnet/cumbria In spite of the doom and gloom on the vacancy front, the site regularly features over 100 jobs from employers recruiting in the North West. IT vacancies are particularly frequent with common vacancies for Trainee Recruitment Consultants (how many people think of this as a career?), Teachers of English as a Foreign Language, and Trainee Sales Managers as well as more niche opportunities in marketing, the creative sector, sports coaching and subject tuition.

We also have a large number of business placement opportunities for students and graduates at www.cumbria.ac.uk/grab At the moment there are surprisingly few applicants for these opportunities, which pay at least £6.00 per hour, often with expenses. Currently, almost all placements involve marketing in some form but this can vary from week to week.

Useful Discussion on You Tube

Are there any jobs for graduates? Public Sector Question Time with Graduates Yorkshire http://j.mp/fsUzDZ

Handy viewing for anyone applying for graduate traineeships this year.

Temporary Staff in Demand

This information has been provided by Kim Reay, a consultant working for recruitment agency Hays in Carlisle.

"Almost one in four (22%) UK employers are planning to increase their use of temporary labour in the next three months, according to the Recruitment & Employment Confederation’s latest JobsOutlook.

"With many of our clients requesting temporary cover throughout the festive period and into the New Year, now is the ideal time to secure your next role.

"If you know someone looking for a job tell us about them. When we find them a new job, you’ll be rewarded with gift vouchers."

More details on current vacancies are available from www.hays.co.uk

Notes from Careers Mini Convention at Fusehill Street Campus

CEVA Logistics

Further to yesterday's entry, CEVA (formerly TNT) Logistics offer a one year programme including 4 research assignments on customer sites in the Midlands (e.g Volkswagen, B&Q, Rolls Royce). Access to a car provided during this period.

CEVA customers nearer to our area: British Gypsum (Penrith), Thorn Electrical (Durham) and NHS Scotland. Lots of automotive industry customers.

Looking for 2.2 graduates who are ready to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty, are practical and can think outside the box. Provide life insurance and pension. Starting salary £23k.

Likely first jobs are in operations management in one of their key industry areas (see previous post). Later specialisms might include Finance and Accountancy, Human Resources, IT.

www.cevalogistics.com

Enterprise Rent-A-Car

Increased number of graduate opportunities this year. Looking to recruit 1000 trainees nationally including 100 at their outlets in the North. Locations include Carlisle, Lillyhall, Penrith, Hexham, Morpeth, Newcastle, Dumfries, Barrow, Kendal, Morecambe, Lancaster.

New this year: 3 month summer paid internship placements for first and second year students who want to improve sales and customer service. Dealing with telephone queries, taking and upgrading bookings, administration, reporting and analysis.

Also 12 month internship placements for students on business-related courses.

www.erac.com

Good Companions

Offer flexible hours for home carers at various locations within an eleven mile radius of Carlisle - numerous vacancies for forthcoming contracts.

Start on £6.50 an hour plus performance bonus, car and mileage as well as free NVQ training and uniform.

www.goodcompanionscareservices.co.uk