Category: Improving employability

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Placement Insights from Roche

Returning from a year in industry to complete their current year at Newcastle University, we interviewed Finn Rea about their time with Roche. This is what they had to say:

Who did your industrial placement with?  

A Swiss pharmaceutical company called Roche  

What was your role?  

Data scientist  

Why did you do a placement?  

Within the tech industry, I saw that experience seemed to be more valuable than qualifications. I really wanted to gain an edge when it came to applying for jobs at the end of my degree, so doing a placement was a must for me. I also want to take the opportunity to see what it was like to work in the healthcare industry and whether this was something I would want to pursue after university. It was also an opportunity to learn about the application process and how to find jobs.  

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

I started from the end of October to the end of December, but then university got busy, so I stopped applying for a while. Then I did most of my applying in February. I applied for 30 roles and after each application, I logged what stage I was at with that role in an excel sheet to help keep track of everything. 

How was the application experience?  

Initially, I found the process exceedingly difficult, not getting many responses or using a good interview technique while also trying to balance it with university studies. I knew that by reflecting and improving on my CV and gaining some interview practice through a couple interviews, I would be more likely to progress further with job applications and hopefully get a job.  

I also didn’t take the first opportunity that came to me but waited to be able to pick from a couple of options. 

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

I attended a couple of CV writing sessions provided by the careers service. I did also take inspiration from and ask advice from the CVs of other students on my course, which was a massive help. 

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

I mostly worked on exploratory data science projects. Looking at the newest technologies and methodologies within data science. I also had the chance to talk at conferences about things explored at the company.  

How was the overall experience of doing a placement?  

I would strongly recommend to anyone to try and do a placement year. I gained a lot of experience and learnt a lot while there. I also got to see how a big company worked, and how it worked across multiple different time zones. 

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

My company has offered to pay me to do a master’s apprenticeship at the company, something which I am planning to do. 

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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.