A few days ago, I went to a networking event in Nottingham about potential career paths for after University and the different ways you can get into a role successfully. The event was from 2:45pm until 6pm on 23rd January 2020!
To begin the event, there was a short talk from a representative of the Employability Team ensuring that we know what resources are available and where we can get help from. Jake Schogger also did a little chat about his journey into business, and that initially he had no idea what career he wanted to do, and through meeting a variety of wonderful people, he's now leading a variety of different teams and had made some good connections for life. Finally, Bradley Fox, the NTSU President 2019/2020 also spoke about his journey through University life, giving a variety of life long tips to the students that attended the event, and his plans for after his role of NTSU President has ended!
In terms of the three panels, I decided to go to 'Be your own boss: The Hive', 'Bright Networking' and finally 'Pitch Yourself'...
‘Be Your Own Boss: The Hive’: Helped people think about whether they wanted to go into a freelance job and work for themselves. ‘The Hive’ is part of the University that can help build your business with you, and they will continue to support you upto three years after you’ve graduated so it was very helpful. The screenshots on the left were from the talk. We were asked to write one thing we wanted to get out of the session to which I answered with ‘Understand the different ways to have a business and ways to approach it’ - which was quite vague, but I was hoping to work freelance part time or do ‘one off’ paid jobs, but primarily have a full time job which brings in regular money.
At the beginning of the session we were asked ONE thing that we wanted to learn in the session and I decided to write 'Understand the different ways to have a business + the ways to approach it'.
‘Bright Networking’ was the second talk that I went to, ran by Jake Schlogger and Akil Hunte (a recent Law Graduate from NTU) about how to use social media to network effectively, and actually utilise the connections you make, rather than just adding random people and never speaking to them. I am already very active on a lot of social media platforms including LinkedIn, so found this talk very helpful.
'Pitch Yourself’ was the final talk that I decided to go to, ran by Becci Hubbard. This talk was simply to talk about how you sell yourself through your documents (including your CV and cover letter if it’s necessary), and if you were to speak about yourself, what would you focus on.
As you can see from the above screenshots, there were a variety of slides speaking about how you should sell yourself, especially on both social media and on your professional documents. In addition to this, you should be speaking about your experiences in a more advanced way rather than just 'I completed this...or I am completing this...'. Instead, you should be using words and phrases like 'I demonstrated [INSERT SKILL] when I completed [INSERT JOB/WORK EXPERIENCE/PROJECT] by [INSERT EVIDENCE/DETAILS]. In terms of selling yourself, it is very important to be very 'to the point' rather than speaking about yourself vaguely. Each individual has their own specific skills and strengths, and you should play on the things that make you different from the next person (such as student mentoring, digital work, work experiences others may not have completed for example)...
The final slide that I decided to take a screenshot of was simply a mindmap that had a variety of factors you could include when speaking about yourself including 'Skills & Qualities, 'Qualifications' and anything related to 'Social' or 'Travel' opportunities. Overall I found the event very beneficial and it definitely opened my eyes to the variety of opportunities out there, especially for somebody like me who is just about to finish my degree and needing to build up connections quickly and effectively.
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