ADD ADVICE TO FAVWork experience and skills
Work experience is an excellent way to fill in gaps in your CV. In order to get the most out of work experience, you need to identify which skills you have and which you need.
Start by carrying out a ’skills audit’ to identify gaps. Write a list of key skills and things you’ve done that illustrate how you’ve developed each one.
To work out which career skills are vital for the graduate job you want, read recruitment literature and talk to careers advisers. If you haven’t decided which career you want to pursue, focus on commonly requested skills like those to the right.
So, for example, working behind a bar could help you to develop:
What career skills do graduate recruiters look for?
A University of Sheffield study of more than 10,000 recruitment advertisements found that the top-ten attributes graduate recruiters valued were:
- oral communication
- teamwork
- enthusiasm
- motivation
- initiative
- leadership
- commitment
- interpersonal skills
- organisation
- foreign language communication.
- numeracy skills – carrying out swift mental arithmetic and cashing up at the beginning and end of shifts
- teamwork – working effectively with other members of staff to cope with stressful situations and solve problems
- customer awareness – dealing with complaints and building a rapport with customers.
Include information about career skills acquired during your studies, such as communication skills (developed through giving presentations, for example) and leadership skills (perhaps developed through group projects).
If after completing your skills audit you find that you’re lacking key career skills, you need to take steps to remedy this. The best approach is through work experience. And even if you can already provide evidence of all the career skills on the list, work experience is still a good idea. There’s no substitute for skills developed in real workplace environments.
