OXFORD

C
GAINING EXPERIENCE + DEVELOPING SKILLS
GAINING
EXPERIENCE +
DEVELOPING SKILLS
Alongside your studies it can be invaluable to accumulate experience in a variety of different
settings. You will not only learn what you enjoy doing and are good at, but also you will develop
important ‘transferrable skills’ that organisations will be looking for.
Graduate employers expect you to have both a solid (predicted)
degree class and strong employability skills that you have
developed at university.
Nine core employability skills are listed on the next two pages
with some suggestions of how to build and improve expertise
expected for many roles as well, such as strong numerical and
Recruiters tell us that they are generally impressed with the
ability of Oxford students to display these skills compared
to other graduates. However, they stress the importance for
Oxford students to develop and demonstrate skills that are not
necessarily developed through their academic work - especially
commercial awareness and team-work.
To support you, The Careers Service and OUSU run a number
of programmes to enhance your experience and work-relevant
skills, including insight schemes, internships and personal
development programmes. These are outlined on pages 33-39.
Julie Mabberley
Chairman, Community Voice
on Planning (CoVoP)
Community Voice on Planning is
a charity that seeks to support
sustainable development.
It does so by informing
Government policy development and supporting local
communities with planning issues.
A Student Consultancy team helped them with the
strategic challenge: how to engage with younger
people to increase their understanding of planning
and ways of influencing development in the future?
Julie Mabberley, Chairman of CoVoP, was looking for
real value from her consultancy team:
“Although there was no charge for the service, we
invested time to brief the project and support the
group as it progressed. It was important to get
something really useful back and we did.”
“We were impressed by the commitment of the
students and their grasp of our challenge, as well as
the way they applied their critical thinking skills to our
project. We could also see that they worked pretty
well together as a team.”
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www.careers.ox.ac.uk