GAINING EXPERIENCE AND DEVELOPING SKILLS
Seven ways to gain experience Work experience is an opportunity to explore your options and make good things happen. See individual employers’ websites to check how they have adapted their offering during COVID-19 restrictions.
Work experience can be: A way to develop valuable skills and accomplish something noteworthy. A chance to try out possible career directions. An opportunity to make contacts in fields that interest you. A chance to earn money. Work experience provides a valuable opportunity to develop awareness and understanding of yourself: what really interests you, how you like to work, and what you find most fulfilling. It also has a very important role in enhancing your employability. In a study of major graduate employers (High Fliers 2017), half of the recruiters surveyed warned that graduates with no work experience were unlikely to be successful in applying for graduatelevel jobs in their organisations. This is because work experience: Enables you to enhance and apply your skills. Provides evidence of your skills and achievements that you can highlight in your applications and talk about in interviews. There’s lots of work experience that you can do eg: student committee roles, volunteering, summer jobs and individual projects. What you’ve chosen to do already can be a useful clue as to what other forms of work experience and ultimately, jobs, might be fulfilling, as outlined in the earlier section on Developing Your Career Ideas. Here are seven ideas to get you started.
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www.careers.ox.ac.uk
