Be all that you can be

If you are applying for a course or a new job that requires that you have an interview beforehand, or if you have a presentation or meeting coming up much of your confidence and ultimately your success in that circumstance will be dependent upon how prepared you are for it.

If two people of the same level and type of education and professional experience are applying for the same job and if both of these parties are generally confident people, the deciding factor may well come down to which of these people know most about the specific job they are applying for. Read up all you can about the company, business or course you are applying for, then if any opportunity comes up where you can demonstrate that knowledge – such as to explain why you think the job/course is right for you and vice-versa – take advantage of it!

Always play to your strengths and always try to deepen and diversify those strengths. In terms of just building your self-confidence, if you practise and expose yourself to the things that you already know you are good at you will likely enjoy doing so and experience a boost to your confidence with every little success or improvement. The confidence you get from doing the things you are good at will help to counter-balance any disappointments or little failures you may experience while applying for jobs, embarking on new manager training schemes or just trying out new things in general.

Indeed, always seek to improve on, or even eradicate, your weaknesses, while accepting that no-one can be perfect or successful at everything. The idea is to minimise the areas where you are lacking in confidence so that you feel at least competent or neutral in those areas. You don’t have to be the expert at everything and if you think you are you are in fact cultivating a far more dangerous weakness – arrogance and/or hubris.

Besides, no-one likes an outspoken know-it-all…!

Don’t allow yourself to wallow in past failures but DO reflect on them. In other words, learn you’re your mistakes – see where you went wrong and why and think of ways to avoid making those same mistakes again. But then move on.

Visualise yourself as being successful in a particular situation and you are much more likely to be. This might seem to be so airy-fairy as to be a joke, but numerous psychological studies have shown that people who imagine themselves being confident and successful in a particular situation and who run images through their mind’s eye about how relaxed they are going to be and how confidently they are going to speak during an interview (say) ARE more confident and successful and confident during that meeting. Try it for yourself. Seriously. Sometimes it can make all the difference

Imagination cannot give you qualifications, skills or experience you don’t have and so you may still be turned down for a particular job if you do not fulfil the requirements they are looking for. That said, if you have all the practical skills and qualifications your potential employer is looking for, a relaxed, warm and confident presentation will often tip the balance in your favour away from similarly qualified applicants.

Confidence tips the balance when it comes to generating the momentum to change your life. If you want to get additional training by starting a new course or whether you just want to shine in a job interview, confidence is key.

Over the next few articles we will look at different ways to improve confidence and performance during interviews, meetings and presentations of various sorts, whatever your goals and ambitions.

In many ways, being confident is what you DO even moiré than it is what you ARE. If you truly feel that you are lacking in confidence in a particular setting it can help to think of someone you know who IS confident in that setting and then emulate their body language, how they talk and walk.

This doesn’t mean you should mimic all of their peculiarities and copy their accent or whatever, but if you seek to emulate their confident speech patterns and general body language you will be behaving in a confident manner. Once people start to see you as confident they will react to you in a different way which will further enforce your confident behaviour. Try it and see for yourself.

Smile more and chat with new people more readily. This doesn’t mean you should go\ around with a constant grin on your face, dragging people into conversation even if they don’t want to be. It’s just that if you behave in a more friendly and engaging way people will generally react in a more positive way towards you, reaffirming your own self confidence.

When researching and seeking advice regarding graduate employment, it is important to consider the full range of jobs that are available to those suitably qualified. The statistics alone do not provide a full picture, so it is worthwhile considering all angles available. First, consult a careers counsellor or adviser, usually provided by the university or educational institution. Recruitment agency advisers are also worth approaching for tips and guidance as they deal with employment issues daily.

In today’s employment market there are many more senior positions and fast track schemes available to the new graduate that would have been available 20 years ago. This is due to the fact that a much higher proportion of the work force are now graduates, therefore widening what is available to fresh employees. Another side effect of the increase in the percentage of graduate in the market is that graduates are can now start within a company in a position that does not require a degree and climb the ranks, gaining more and more experience along the way.

When searching for either a graduate career or job, it is very important to stay realistic and concentrate on the progression that is offered within the company. This long-term view will allow for better prospects in the future and make it easier to move horizontally within the industry.

With the relevant research, education, CV and career plan it should not be difficult to achieve the career that you want.

Those who leave higher education often face the challenge of deciding upon a suitable career and finding work within the chosen sector. Deciding which career path to follow is an extremely important and complicated process. Seeking career advice is always and researching the different options available will provide a good starting point for and graduates entering the labour market.

While at university it is very easy to believe the various myths about careers and the labour market that create either a favourable or unfavourable picture of reality. Therefore it is important to approach relevant centres of advice regarding the industry or career, where options can be explored and the myths broken.

The Higher Education Statistics Agency figures show that at least two thirds of recent graduates find employment within the first 6 months of their graduation in the UK, while the rest are divided over unemployment, overseas employment and further education. Considering that high proportion of graduates find employment after university, it is vital to make sure that they have the right access to advice and that they seek it.

The number of those that do not find employment in the first 6 months after graduation has been falling slowly but steadily over the last few years, indicating that a high level of education is a good way of ensuring long term employment and career progression.

Though higher education leads to more opportunities in the employment market, ensuring that you are in the right career for you is still highly problematic and requires a lot of thought and research.

Finding the career you want after graduating can be a daunting and difficult process, and it doesn’t matter whether you are a young graduate from your first degree or a an older graduate leaving university in your thirties.

It’s difficult to know where to begin with your research into jobs and although looking at vacancies is often the usual starting point it is worth bearing in mind that most vacancies are not advertised in that way, and so you are likely to get a skewed vision of what the graduate employment market is like.

Also, deciding what career is right for you can be problematic. If you are unsure you would do well to think about your interests and whatever expertise you may have and think how they may apply to a career. Keep in mind any constraints upon your time or mobility before applying for certain jobs. Children and disabilities can make some jobs less viable for you than others.

Once you have a profile of what you want from life and what you think you have to offer in terms of skills and knowledge, you can use this to narrow down your search for jobs, further courses or whatever else you might want to do after graduating.

Be brave. Your mantra should be “who dares, wins” and “it doesn’t have to be forever”. In other words, if you are free to do so, take a risk. If you aim for the stars and miss, you might still hit the moon, and if you aren’t sure that in 5 or 10 years you will continue to like the career you’re going for now, remember that you can always change careers providing you plan well. Never feel trapped by your circumstances. There is always a way to change them, even if they are in ways that you would not have expected or thought of under normal circumstances.

Once you have a good idea of what you want to do having graduated from university, think hard about your feelings about further education and/or training, what skills and experiences you already have, what sort of working environments may or may not appeal to you and the sort of life you want to live.

Once armed with all this self-reflective knowledge, go out there and start asking around, but try to do so in a focussed and structured way.

Here are some examples of ports of call during your enquiries:

- University careers adviser.

- The information garnered by Prospects, particularly the ‘What jobs would suit me?’ section (found at: www.prospects.ac.uk/links/Pplanner). This service offers CV checking, careers advice and details for a whole range of regional graduate services in the UK and Republic of Ireland.

- Psychometric tests. These are often offered by university careers offices and are an excellent way of analysing oneself. They test numeracy, literacy and diagrammatic reasoning, and show your strengths and weaknesses in these areas. Some companies and organisations (like the Civil Service) require candidates take psychometric tests, and research shows that practice actually improves performance, so never be disheartened by a poor first showing after one such test.

- Prospects.ac.uk also offers a wide range of tests and self-assessment exercises for you to peruse at your leisure. Take a look at www.prospects.ac.uk/links/Online/Tests.

Employers more often than not look for skills as well as education.

If you have been taking psychometric tests or any other recognised character development tests or courses, use what you have learned, any qualifications you have earned and any work experience that you have to produce a personal profile.

Your profile should provide evidence that you posses competencies that your potential employers are looking for. They will want some sort of evidence that you posses skills and experience for a wide range of jobs.

You should make a list of the skill and competencies that you already have. Here are some ideas of the sorts of things you might include if you think they are relevant to you:

• can you plan time effectively?
• are you good at working under pressure and to deadlines?
• how are your reading, analysing and synthesising skills for large amounts of text?
• can you work independently?
• are you adaptive to new circumstances?
• are you good at problem solving? (can you give examples?)
• are you capable of thinking originally and imaginatively? Like how?
• do you take the initiative?
• are you articulate and can you express your ideas clearly both in writing and orally?
• do you have experience presenting information in many ways, such as through seminars, under timed examinations, projects or presentations, group discussions, lab or technical reports?

All of these are potentially relevant to your potential employers. All of that said, be sure to tailor make what you are writing to suit to job you are applying for. Be honest of course, but you need not dwell too liong in your personal statement about your skills as a brick layer if you are applying for a new job as a computer programmer, say.

Both careers centres at universities and even government advice centres can help you write an appropriate CV.

Before you decide on which university to go to it might be worth looking at the League Tables that are printed every year by the Guardian (you can also find them online with a search).

These tables will show you how well your potential university is performing in terms of how many graduates they have and at what level, although bear in mind that these tables do not always specify down to departmental levels, so a slightly lower scoring university overall might have a better specific department than a higher scoring university.

If you look on the Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) website and on the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s (AHRC) website you can find a list of university departments that qualify for ESRC and AHRC recognition and funding, which means that they excel in those fields at least.

A final point to consider is that just because you might be attending a University or department that is recognised as being at the top of its particular tree does not mean that you will be guaranteed better grades. All the work and dedication will still be yours and all a good university will be able to offer you is good facilities and good academics to teach you.

So you can count on a high graded university to have all the facilities you need, but you still need to be sure that you want to dedicate up to 4 years of your life studying full time.

Many university courses provide given the option of some kind of professional work placement, which might be an incentive (or disincentive) to take up that course.

These placements can take various different forms, the two most common being:

- A one full-year placement, most often between the 3rd and 4th semester or second and third year

And,

- Two 6 month placements one in the 2nd year and one in the 3rd year.

If you have never worked in the field that you wish to become qualified in by returning to university, a course with a work placement is an invaluable way of introducing yourself to that sort of work and will also look good on your CV when you come to apply for the sorts of job you want after graduation.

Professional work placements offer the added benefit of giving you a break from full time studying, which can get rather monotonous after a while. You could return from your work placement having had an interesting break that has provided you with new perspective and momentum to finish your studies.

There are even courses with work placements in other countries, giving an opportunity to see a bit more of the world and potentially even to learn another language if you want – always a bonus in our globalising world!

One very important thing you should check in advance of applying for a course with a work placement is age limits. Although not always the case with university courses that have implicit work placements, some work placements are open to people only up to certain ages – so you should be sure to get any potential restrictions spelled out in advance.