Are LSE students the most career-focused in the UK? The figures would certainly seem to suggest this.
Over 2,700 students had one to one career advice, 750 attended a seminar on career management skills, 2,500 came to one of our careers fairs and 1,100 to a sector specific careers forum. This is just a flavour of the work of the Careers Service since October last year.
As we move towards aligning the Careers Service more closely to the specialist needs of the School, this News&Views special allows us to update you on our work this year, and some of our plans for next.
This is the first in a series of initiatives to tell you about our work, invite your feedback and so ensure we are delivering what the whole School community wants. In August, the entire Careers team will become employed directly by the School, and this will allow us to be even more responsive to the changing needs of the whole LSE community. We welcome feedback on existing services and ideas for new projects. Do visit our purpose built centre, 6th Floor, Tower 3, and email your feedback to me: f.m.sandford@lse.ac.uk
We have recently purchased a new system, developed for Warwick University Careers Service, that will allow students to book career sessions online. We will be piloting this during the summer term, with a view to launching it fully for Michaelmas term. This system will do much to ease the queues of students trying to access the Careers centre and make it easier for students to get careers help.
For students who find the whole process of choosing a career bewildering, LSE can be an intimidating place, with so many students active in the job hunt. We have introduced 'Don't Panic' days, targeted at students who are confused by the choice available. These days have proved to be very popular, with over 120 students using the drop in service.
However, the focus of many students' job hunt remains fairly narrow. It seems that students think that when they leave LSE, the choice is to turn left out of Houghton Street for a career making their fortunes in the City, or right to change the world in the Westminster Village. We plan to challenge these stereotypes next year, and have events planned to broaden students horizons. We will be focusing on careers offered by manufacturing companies and other Blue Chip organisations, and working with the LSESU Entrepreneurship Society to encourage students to look at enterprise skills and starting their own businesses. This will culminate in an LSE version of the BBC2 programme, The Dragons' Den, in early December.
^
European career events
LSE in Brussels
Over 50 LSE master's students visited Brussels recently to meet employers at a specialist careers fair organised by the Careers Service. Employers at the fair were offering internships in a variety of NGOs, multlilaterals, public affairs consultancies, think tanks, research foundations and human rights organisations
Set up in conjunction with the Paris school, Sciences-Po, this was a chance for students looking for a Brussels based career to meet employers who rarely come to the UK to recruit.
Gregoire Polad, LSE alumnus, from Blueprint partners, wrote: 'It was a great pleasure for Blueprint to participate in the careers fair and I have to say I was much impressed by the organisation as well as the candidates.'
Trips were also arranged to NATO, the EC and the International Crisis Group.
LSE in Paris
The Careers Services of LSE and Sciences-Po have collaborated on a number of events since the first Brussels Careers Fair in 2003. The most recent was an invitation for our students to attend the Sciences-Po NGO and International Organisations Careers Fair on 11 May. This was a unique opportunity to find out about working for French NGOs and international organisations.
^
11,000 hits a month for JobOnline
The LSEJobOnline website is an online searchable database of exciting jobs from employers who wish to specially target LSE students and alumni. Each month the website receives 11,000 hits and there are over 500 positions advertised at any one time.
Employers are diverse and range from financial firms including Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, to NGOs and charities such as Christian Aid, International Institute for Environment and Development, and the Disasters Emergency Committee. LSEJobOnline is updated every day so students should get into the habit of checking it just like they check their email.
For more immediate vacancies and information about events being held we send emails through our LSEAlert system. This service sends emails direct to the students inbox and continues after they have graduated. Students should fill in their details at: www.careers.lon.ac.uk/output/Page24.asp
^
Alternatives to banking?
Over 500 students visited the More to Life Than Banking fair held in February.
Attended by 30 employers ranging from think tanks such as the Foreign Policy Centre to NGOs such as Earthwatch, this fair proved to be extremely popular.
New for this year was the 'Ask the Alumni' area where students could talk to those LSE alumni who had forged careers in alternative sectors and were on hand to give some words of wisdom and inspiration.
^
Social enterprise - a first
In February, the Careers Service held the first Social Enterprise Fair to be held at a UK university. Run in partnership with London Social Economy Taskforce, the event was a great success for all concerned.
As economics student Shuwei Fang said: 'The fair really opened my eyes to social enterprise and I had some informative one to ones with organisations like Green Works and Social Enterprise London. What a great alternative to banking!'
^
What do LSE graduates do?
Finding out what our graduates do after graduation is vital for departments, as well as current and prospective students. Like all other UK universities, we follow up all graduates to find out what they are doing six months after they leave us. While this timescale is too short to give much meaningful data, it does provide a useful snapshot of first jobs.
Collecting the data
This January, the Careers Service started to collect destination information from our 2004 graduates.
All graduates were sent the national questionnaire by post, and we then followed up non-respondents by phone as we are required to get information from 80 per cent of UK and 50 per cent of EU leavers. This meant making over 1,000 phone calls, and contacting graduates took a good four weeks.
This year, working in the early evening with careers advisers, were eight superb student helpers: Carolyn Housman, Aaron Martin, Nancy Dinsmore, Stuart Miller; Christie Okpe, Sarah Wolpert, Xueling Lee and Onike Gollo. Our thanks to them all for their hard work in collecting the data.
The DLHE (Destination of Leavers in Higher Education) survey asks a series of questions about activities undertaken by the respondent. For instance, it asks what their current employment circumstance is and, if employed, what the nature of their work is, their salary, employer's location and a brief description of their duties. Graduates who are looking for work, taking time out to travel or are in further study are also asked for their response.
This year's data analysis is still being coded. Once completed we will be able to distribute it to LSE departments, and publish the findings on our new website.
New website
Last summer we also carried out a longitudinal survey of those who graduated in 2001. From these findings, together with case studies collected from graduates over the last decade, we have compiled a new website with overall statistical, and departmental specific, information. We launched this new website to departmental administrators at a coffee and croissant morning on 4 March.
The website will be updated over the next few months with new data from the destination survey of 2004 and we would be very interested to hear from colleagues about how we can improve this key resource.
^
Internship scheme
The House of Commons was the venue for the launch of the LSE Public Policy Group's Social Issues and Public Affairs Internship scheme. Director Howard Davies, Barry Sheerman MP and Professor Patrick Dunleavy were on hand to formally announce the scheme to an audience of MPs, public affairs employers, careers service patrons and interns.
In this exciting new development the Careers Service and the Public Policy Group have joined forces to extend the existing Parliamentary Internship scheme to cover think tanks, public affairs and NGOs. The scheme will enable post graduate students to intern during their time at the School and gain valuable professional experience to complement their academic studies.
The Internship scheme is funded through the Careers Service Patron Scheme.
^
Careers Service patrons
The Careers Service thanks the following organisations for their support, which allows us to improve our services to all students:
Bank of America, Citigroup, Credit Suisse First Boston, Deloitte, Deutsche Bank, Frontier Economics, General Electric (GE), Goldman Sachs, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, KPMG, Morgan Stanley, Olswang, Procter & Gamble, PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Royal Bank of Scotland.
^
Careers forum for media
Budding journalists filled the Old Theatre for the lunchtime forum on 2 March to hear the pros and cons of working in print and the broadcast media.
The panel, chaired by Professor Robin Mansell of LSE's Media and Communications Department, included Clive Jones, chief executive of ITVNews Group, Martha Kearney (pictured), political editor of BBC Newsnight and Radio 4 presenter, and Tania Mason, news and sub-editor of Third Sector magazine.
All talked enthusiastically about their work and explained the varied roles and jobs they had done to get to their current position. Talking candidly about the difficulty of getting their first jobs and overcoming initial rejection, they emphasised the need to grasp any possible opportunity to start a media career, for example, as a runner, secretary or a journalist for a local paper or trade magazine, even if your sights are set on broadcasting.
^
Surviving university
LSEJobShop is an electronic notice board specifically aimed at advertising part-time jobs to help students 'survive' university. As well as advertising for external employers we also advertise any appropriate vacancies on behalf of the School.
We have three student helpers who spend their time with us encouraging local businesses to advertise. There are currently 100 jobs advertised from bar work to sales assistants and fundraisers to jobs at Buckingham Palace. This service is free of charge to both students and employers. For further details, please email: Jobshop@lse.ac.uk
^
LSE select
As part of our campaign to market our students and alumni to employers, we have been working with the School's Business Systems and Services to build a searchable CV database - LSE Select.
This is a CV building and publishing service that allows students and alumni to build their CV according to key criteria and post it online for potential employers to search.
We are always thinking of ways of helping our alumni in particular, and we know that many employers would like a time-efficient way of getting access to experienced staff.
Although this is still in the experimental phase, employers are very enthusiastic and we are confident that it will be a great service to LSE students, alumni and recruiters.
To be part of this service, students should visit the LSE homepage, sign in to LSE for You and click on CV builder. Those alumni who cannot access LSE for You should contact the alumni office, tel: 020 7955 7361, for a user name and password.
^
Who wants to be a lawyer?
Good news for non-law students
For several years the College of Law has offered LSE Law students guaranteed places on their courses. This year they have agreed with the Careers Service to extend the Guaranteed Places Scheme to non-law students at LSE for places on their Postgraduate Diploma in Law course.
The course is the first step to entering the legal profession for anyone who does not have a law
degree and the new agreement effectively removes the uncertainty at the start of legal training. The agreement takes effect for courses starting in September 2005. Any LSE student who has obtained at least a 2:2, irrespective of subject, will be eligible. For more information call into the Careers Service or email: admissions@lawcol.co.uk
^
Postgraduate research
Gareth Roberts' SET for Success review of postgraduate research and training (2002) revealed that, while postgraduate researchers had many of the transferable skills demanded by employers, there was also room for further development. In response to this, the Careers Service is working on a programme of training and development.
Funding through 'Roberts' is enabling us to do additional careers development work in conjunction with the Teaching and Learning Centre including seminars during PhD Week on Your PhD: what next?; Making Effective Applications; Personality and Career Choice, and Succeeding at Interview. There are also regular one-to-one careers discussions and seminars available with Iain McLoughlin either in the Careers Office or as arranged within departments.
^
Careers for contract researchers
For a little over a year, in response to government initiatives to improve career prospects for university research staff, the Careers Service has been working in collaboration with the Teaching and Learning Centre (TLC) to provide dedicated careers advice and guidance for contract research staff (CRS).
The scheme has been promoted by TLC to all researchers in the School and in the first year over a third of research staff took the opportunity to have an individual discussion or attend one of the dedicated lunchtime seminars.
This year the seminar programme has been extended to include sessions on career management skills and personality tests which develop self-awareness and show how personality can link to career choice. All sessions are held in small informal groups, with a light lunch provided by TLC, and have proved very popular. So if you are a contract researcher why not come along?
See what's available on the CRS website: Research staff (and the bagels are good!)
^
Writing references: an easier approach
Over the past year, the Teaching and Learning Centre, BSS and the Careers Service have been working on developing a personal development planning package for students. Our approach has been to not only give students the ability to record, audit and reflect on their skills, but also to make it easier for reference writers to access students' results, class reports and see their extra curricular activities and work experience.
In the first phase of this project, reference writers will be able to access, from the photo boards of their students on LSE for You, their students' CVs in addition to exam results and class reports. On the same page, they can access a comprehensive Guide to Reference Writing. This guide was produced as a result of research on what employers and academic institutions expect from a reference, legal considerations and current good practice. Students can produce their CVs through the CV builder (see LSE Select) and also in LSE for You.
By being able to view all of this information about the student, reference writers should be able to produce a comprehensive overview of the student and, through their CV, students will be able to give the person writing their reference additional information on their employability skills.
By next academic year, students will also have a space on the class reports to comment, and to reflect on their academic and other skills development.
^
Student successes
LSE students have recently been successful in a number of high profile schemes and competitions:
-
Seven students, a record number, reached the final round of the Presidential Management Fellowship scheme. This highly popular scheme attracts outstanding master's degree and doctoral-level students to federal service careers. The two-year programme is an excellent developmental opportunity for beginning a career in the US government.
-
Two students, Joel Kenrick and Alexa Sharples, were selected for the Goldman Sachs Global Leaders Competition. This annual competition identifies and rewards the academic excellence and leadership potential of 100 of the most accomplished second-year students from all disciplines.
-
For the first time one of our students was successful in getting through the highly competitive Asian Development Bank Internship scheme. Massimiliano Cali, from Geography and Environment, will be working on South Asia Sub-regional Trade and Investment Co-operation.
^
Community action days: a fresh approach to job hunting
The LSE Volunteer Centre is working with the LSE Careers Service to offer students the opportunity to meet potential employers at the same time as contributing to the local community.
Companies who recruit LSE graduates are being invited to take part in Community Action Days. The LSE Volunteer Centre will liaise with companies to organise one-off volunteering events in the local community.
Rebecca Milton, who runs the School's Volunteer Centre, is delighted that the LSE Careers Service is backing the initiative: 'The scheme is a great chance for our students to combine two very important issues - choosing a career and giving something back to local causes.' she said. 'It also demonstrates that big companies recognise the value of volunteering and the skills that can be gained.'
The scheme will be launched this month at the LSE Careers Service Recruiter Day on 25 May and it is hoped that the first Community Action Day will take place at the beginning of Michaelmas term. For further information, please contact Rebecca Milton at the LSE Volunteer Centre, email: r.r.milton@lse.ac.uk
^