Gaining experience and developing skills

Alongside your studies making time for extra-curricular activities can not only be enriching personally, but professionally too. Learning new skills and developing those you most enjoy will contribute crucially to your overall employability as the majority of organisations look for both academic qualifications and interests beyond academia.

Graduate employers expect you to have both a solid (predicted) degree class and strong employability skills that you have developed at university.

On the following pages, we highlight the core employability skills that recruiters look for, and suggestions of how to build and improve these while you are at Oxford. Additional job specific skills can be expected for many roles as well, such as strong numerical and analytical skills, or specific language and technical knowledge or expertise.

Recruiters tell us that they are generally impressed with the ability of Oxford students to display these skills compared to other graduates. However, they stress the importance for Oxford students to develop and demonstrate skills that are not necessarily developed through their academic work – especially commercial awareness and teamwork.

To support you, the Careers Service run a number of programmes to enhance your experience and workrelevant skills, including insight schemes, internships and personal development programmes. These are outlined in the guidance on employability programmes.

“Despite the challenging academic workloads, make time for extracurricular activities because the skills you learn here will be invaluable and help you later with your job interviews. Recruiters appreciate the extra effort and time that goes into these activities and enjoy listening to competency examples related to outside academia.

Dr Lakshmi Manjoosha Adapa, IT Consultant at Accenture