Category: DYPS: Develop Your professional Skills

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How to write cover letters

A few months ago, I wrote an article about creating a CV, with the assistance of resources provided by the careers service. I learnt a great deal, but it was only one-half of the initial application process. This is a follow-up to that article, focusing on the other half: the cover letter. And thankfully, the careers service has resources to help again! 

When it comes to writing a cover letter to accompany your CV, there are several pitfalls you could run into. And the main reason is that many people don’t know exactly why they are writing a cover letter.  

Many make the mistake of just using it as an opportunity to rattle off their CV again.  

What you should be focusing on is you, what you are doing, why you want the role and why they should want you for the role.  

It is about linking the skills you have shown in your CV to the role you are applying for and why exactly they make you perfect for the role. 

What goes in my cover letter? 

In the past when I tried writing a cover letter, I didn’t really follow a set structure and just wrote until I filled a page. Not the best method to get the attention of a company. But through using the University’s resources, courtesy of the Careers Service, I have a much better understanding of how to approach this one-page conundrum.  

The main objective of a cover letter is to show the company you are applying for who you are.  

That personal touch makes you a person rather than another application in a dozen. The challenge is that you only have one page to do that. Sticking to that one-page limit is hard but here is a method of breaking it down: 

  1. Beginning  
  2. Introduction
  3. Why them?
  4. Why you?
  5. Ending

Let’s look at what each step asks for… 

Beginning 

Address who you are talking to, and make sure to get their name and job title correct! Try to do some research to find the name of the person who will read your application. 

Introduction 

First impressions matter, and this is where you do just that. So be sure to make it something strong, positive and confident. Explain what you are doing now and explain why you are writing. If applying for a specific role, state which role and where you saw the application.  

This part is especially important if you are applying speculatively for a role as you will need to be specific about what kind of role you are applying for and be sure to consider giving a range of options in case the role you want is not available. 

Why you 

Now that they have a rough idea of who you are and why you are writing, it is time to start selling yourself to them and explain why they should hire you for the role. Summarise what you have to offer by talking about the key selling points from your CV that demonstrate that you are what they are looking for. Don’t just repeat what is in your CV (that’s why you have one!), but rather give a concise summary with specific examples. Avoid talking about generic skills and qualities in isolation! 

Convey your enthusiasm for the role and what you can bring to the role by talking about what relevant experience you can bring to the role. This could come from your degree, an internship or other bit of extracurricular work.  

This is the most important part of your cover letter and chances are you might write more for this bit than you would other parts, so feel free to break it down into two paragraphs. 

Why them 

It can be a pain having to write a cover letter for every single company you apply for, and it can be very tempting to just use a generic one; but that will do you no favours. Each cover letter should be tailored to the organisation and role you are applying for. Otherwise, you won’t come across well to employers. 

Research the company to find out as much as possible about the field of work, the company and the role you are applying for. This will also give insight into their ethos, training and product/services which you should also talk about. Furthermore, it will help inform you as to whether this company is the right one for you. 

The orginisation’s website is a great place to start to research but don’t just repeat what is on there. Have a look around on LinkedIn at current employees and what they are up to. 

Ending 

End on a positive and friendly note asking when they would be able to have an interview before signing off with ‘Yours sincerely’ if the name of the person you are applying to is known but if not, put ‘Yours faithfully’ 

The Careers Service has many more resources and detail about what to write in each paragraph of your cover letter, so be sure to check them out here. 

How do I write my cover letter? 

Now that we have a rough idea of what we should include in a cover letter, it is good to get some practice at writing them. The only issue with this is that you need a job to apply for. 

If you want to practice early, you may not want to wait for a specific role to come available for you to practice on. Thankfully though, the university links a fantastic resource where you can find templated job descriptions for a range of different roles. You can find it here. 

By using these examples, you can create cover letters that specifically target the requirements of those roles without the pressure of deadlines.   

The careers service has example cover letters that you can also give some initial inspiration if you are struggling. 

How can I check if my cover letter is good? 

Now that you have practiced writing a cover letter, how do you check what is good and what areas to improve on?  

If you have read the CV article, it mentions an extremely useful AI-powered tool called CareerSet which analyses your CV and highlights what areas you should improve on. CareerSet also works for cover letters.  

Like the CV, you get an overall rating of your cover letter, giving an indication as if you should make changes or not. 

It gives clear examples of not only what you could improve on, but also what you did well! 

Not only does it evaluate the content and structure of your cover letter, but the relevance to the job description you are applying for. This is extremely important to help stop your applications from becoming generic, and are more tailored to the role itself! 

Of course, computer-based feedback may have some advantages, but at the end of the day, you want to make sure your cover letter appeals to an actual human. You can submit your cover letter to the Careers service, and they will give written feedback to you in around five working days. You can book a slot here. 

The career service can also help if you don’t have much work experience to include in your CV as you can book an information appointment to help develop your skills. Additionally, if you need any reasonable adjustments or have extenuating circumstances, the careers service can help you with how best to include this information in your cover letter. 

Cover letters may seem intimidating but at the end of the day, they are just a single page that you get to spend talking about how great you are. How bad can that be? 

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How to prepare for coding interviews

While many steps in the employment process are universal to any role you may apply to, applying for a role as a software developer, or any coding-related job for that matter, you may be expected to do a coding interview. 

This article explains what a coding interview is, what you might be expected to do in them, why you might be expected to do them, and some resources to help you prepare for them. 

What is a coding interview? 

At some point following an initial interview, you may be asked to do a coding interview. This is notorious for being one of the hardest parts of the interview process. During a coding interview, you will be given a task to do within a limited time frame. You might be observed by an interviewer as part of this and expected to explain your programming choices as you go. 

Why do I have to do a coding interview? 

While the purpose of an interview is typically to get a feel for who a potential employee is as a person and if they will fit within a team, a coding interview does the same but to get a feel for who you are as a programmer. It helps determine what your skill level and programming style is like. This is essential as they will want to know what kind of code you might be contributing to their projects. 

Coding interview resources 

There are numerous different resources to help you prepare for coding interviews, the only issue is that for many of them you must pay to use. I’ve collated some free resources that I recommend checking out to hopefully lend a hand when this stage of the interview process comes knocking 

Codewars 

Unsurprisingly, one of the best ways to practice for a coding interview is to code. But rather than working on your larger projects, it is important to try to solve lots of “bitesize” coding problems.  

An excellent resource for this is Codewars.  

Codewars is a platform that helps you learn, train and improve your coding skills by solving a range of tasks at varying difficulty levels. These challenges are called Katas and are specific to the languages and areas you want to focus on.  

You can find these challenges on the Codewars page or if you subscribe to their Weekly Coding Challenge newsletter, you will receive weekly emails with a selection of tasks to solve. 

All the challenges can be completed within the IDE provided on the Codewars website so you could complete them while on the go without your computer. Here is an example of one of their challenges: 

This is a relatively easy problem but nicely lays out how Codewars works. You see what your task is, and some examples of what solutions would be.  

You write your solution in this window before pressing Attempt to see if your solution is correct. If it is, you can then go and look at other people’s solutions to get an idea of how other people attempted the problem! 

This is a great resource to consistently practice your coding skills, and the range of challenges you may encounter will help you prepare for coding interviews. 

If this seems like something you are interested in, find more information here. 

InterviewBit 

Another great resource for coding interviews is InterviewBit. It works in much the same as Codewars with different challenges you can complete but also has some more supplementary content you can use if you so wish. 

There are three main categories to InterviewBit: Practice Problems, Fast Track Courses and Interview Prep.  

You can solve practice problems of varying difficulties much like with CodeWars but you also get to see what kind of companies ask these questions. 

You can also spend time learning the fundamentals of different languages, perfect for when you want to train or revise a certain skill ahead of an interview. 

Another excellent resource on InterviewBit is the Technical Interview Questions. These are guides not only on how to secure roles at large companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft but more generalised roles that would require you to code in certain languages. 

Coding Interview University

Another excellent resource is the GitHub repository Coding Interview University This was created by Josh Masham for interview preparation. It was using these resources that he was able to get a job at Amazon. This repository is jam-packed with details, resources and links that will be sure to help anyone in their journey to employment. 

These are only three different resources you can check out to get that edge when it comes to a coding interview but there are many more out there and not everything will work for you, so just experiment! 

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An Interview with the Careers Service

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We interviewed Sara Williams about their role as Careers Consultant for Newcastle University and learn exactly what they do, and how that can be a big help to you. 

Sum up your role in 10 words or less 

I help/facilitate students to achieve their career goals.

What are the official responsibilities of your role? 

Official responsibilities include: 

  • Carrying out appointments with students either via our drop-in system,  
  • Pre-booked online or in-person and longer 1-hour appointments for career guidance and mock interviews 
  • Delivering some of our central workshops.  

I also work closely with the academics and Employability leads in the schools of Computing and Engineering to understand student requirements and plan a calendar of events.  

Being up to date with what’s happening in the jobs market and sectors that might be relevant to our student groups as well as more broadly with recruitment trends and assessment methods is also an important part of my role. 

What are the unofficial responsibilities of your role? 

Unofficially I get involved with a wider remit of what the career service does whether it be helping out on University Open Days or at Careers Fairs and hosting employer-led events. 

“Have things on your CV beyond academics”

What are the top three mistakes you find that students make when it comes to employability? 

Not mistakes necessarily, more learning points.  

  1. I think maybe underestimating the recruitment process and how many stages you might have to go through for some companies and perhaps not being prepared for that. 
  1. It’s tricky as not everyone can commit to it but, having things on your CV beyond your academics can be really useful, not only so you can showcase a broad range of skills to employers but also as a learning process for you to figure out what you are good at and what you enjoy. 
  1. And I think number three is that students can often feel the pressure to just jump in and start applying before they have taken a step back to try and understand what they might be looking for in their next job, and more broadly, their career. 

What employability resource do you think is most helpful for students? 

I think one of the challenges is that there is SO much information out there and so many resources. I might be biased but our website is really comprehensive and covers a wide range of employability topics from planning your careers to what to expect at assessment centres and what you can do to prepare. 

Here is a link to view all those resources:  https://www.ncl.ac.uk/careers/. 

“Learn as much about the assessment process you will go through as you can”

Where in the process of getting employed (applying, interviews, assessment centre, etc.) do you think students struggle with the most? And how can they overcome that difficulty? 

I think each of the assessment stages can come with its own challenges and people can struggle with different things.  I think the key bit of advice I would give here is for students to try and learn as much about the assessment process they will go through either via speaking to someone at the organisation, looking at their website or looking at sites like Glassdoor. Armed with that knowledge they can then use the multitude of resources via the careers service to help them prepare. If I was pushed for something more specific, I think interviews can be really challenging as sometimes students may not have ever had a formal interview before. There’s a lot of advice and guidance out there on interviews and I’d also encourage students to use careers appointments to practice answers or talk through answers with a consultant. 

How many students make use of the employability team? 

Oooo that’s a tough one as it can be hard to define how students use the Careers Service. As an example, we conducted about 8,400 appointments last year and roughly 4,000 students came to one of our workshops. Beyond that the Careers Service also looks after processing for on-campus job opportunities, hosting employer events like our careers fairs, our curriculum team runs and manages a careers module, our placement team manages around sending 150 students out on placement and our start-up team also supports students in terms of building their own businesses or if they want to operate as a freelancer… 

“Students can make use of the careers service 3 years post-study”

If there was one piece of advice you want students to take away from this interview, what would it be? 

Make use of the careers service!  

We’re here to support you through your time at Newcastle and beyond (students can access us for 3 years post-study) and we offer impartial advice and guidance on anything to do with careers. 

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Forage: Free Lessons from Industry

Your university degree allows you to learn a lot about a range of topics, but with the broadness and speed at which it progresses, it’s impossible to learn everything you want by just focusing on your degree. This is where Forage comes to help! 

Forage is an online virtual work experience platform that hosts several online programs built and endorsed by a slew of big companies. These courses offer great experience in technology and related roles like software engineering, cyber security, or data science. Here are some of them: 

Each of the courses contains tasks engineered to simulate the real-world experience of the industry and each only takes a few hours to complete.  

As part of your degree, you get access to all the courses for free and you can do as many as you want. I recommend experimenting and trying different roles as this resource is a perfect addition to career development or career decision-making. And it lets you experiment with fields you might otherwise not get the chance to learn from! 

With each course completed, you receive a certificate that you can add to either your CV or LinkedIn account. 

I was able to experiment and try a range of different courses that helped test skills and give insights into careers I could go into in the future. One of these was a Software Engineering course run by Electronic Arts. 

They covered a range of insightful and helpful topics through 4 different challenges that only took an hour or so each to complete, which made it a great extracurricular activity. 

This was particularly beneficial to me as I hope to work in the game industry following university, but that didn’t stop me from looking into other courses for fields I wouldn’t want to commit an entire module to, like data science. Cognizant provides an interesting bite-sized look at data science and its applications through its Artificial Intelligence Virtual Experience Program. Introducing things like Google Collab and machine learning, the course provided a nice overview of a part of computer science I didn’t know much about. Here are the different sections: 

I could keep talking about some of my favourite courses, but we would be here for a while. Instead of learning about my experiences with forage, I wholeheartedly recommend you try it out for yourself as soon as possible as not every step to employment is massive, but rather a mere 4 to 6 hours addition. 

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Placement Insights from Newcastle Strategic Solutions Limited 

Returning from a year in industry to complete their final year at Newcastle University, we interviewed Zach Smith about their time with Newcastle Strategic Solutions Limited. This is what they had to say:

Find Out More About Newcastle Strategic Solutions

Who did you do your industrial placement with?  

Newcastle Strategic Solutions Limited 

What was your role?  

Software QA Tester 

Why did you do a placement?  

I did a placement in order to gain some concrete work experience in the software development industry, this is so I could hopefully gain an advantage over my competition when applying for jobs upon graduation 

When did you start applying and how many places did you apply for?  

I started applying around February/March time and applied for at most 20 people 

How was the application experience?  

Relatively straightforward, mostly just making sure my CV was up to date. I wrote a cover letter for each company I applied for and tweaked my CV in scenarios where different experiences might’ve been more useful 

What, if any, help did you get from the university when applying?  

The help I received from the university was mostly to do with their careers site, where companies could post placement opportunities. It was a huge help and ultimately lead me to get this placement 

What work did you do over the course of your placement year?  

I got the opportunity to do a range of things: 

  • Programming automated tests for builds of NSSLs websites which introduced new features. 
  • Testing on live servers of clients to ensure that everything was working as expected before deploying for the public to see and use.  
  • I also had the opportunity to manually test features on the website to ensure that they met the accessibility criteria required. 
  •  I was working alongside teammates in a scrum team and would test whatever the developers would work on before giving it the seal of approval. 

How was the overall experience of doing a placement?  

Fantastic, I was treated really well during my time at NSSL, except for the odd stressful moment, I enjoyed it. One key value that I really appreciated working there was that my input was important and was truly taken into consideration when working on different projects even when it wasn’t about testing. I made a lot of new friends there during the early talent program that they ran too.  

My experience here helped dictate what portion of computer science I would like to specialize in for my final year. Thanks to my time testing the accessibility of the website and new software developed, it has made me want to work in accessibility and hopefully work to improve how accessible software is to the general public. 

Would you like to go back to that company after your final year?  

Based on my experience? Yes.  

With my current circumstances? No, I only say this because following graduation I’d prefer to be employed somewhere where I can live with my family whilst working for a while before I go settle in somewhere like Newcastle. To be honest though, if I was offered a high enough wage to cover the expenses of living alone easily then I probably would take something from NSSL.