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OxfordGuideToCareers2017
OxfordGuideToCareers2017
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C<br />
GAINING EXPERIENCE + DEVELOPING SKILLS<br />
GAINING<br />
EXPERIENCE +<br />
DEVELOPING SKILLS<br />
Alongside your studies it can be invaluable to accumulate experience in a variety of different<br />
settings. You will not only learn what you enjoy doing and are good at, but also you will develop<br />
important ‘transferrable skills’ that organisations will be looking for.<br />
Graduate employers expect you to have both a solid (predicted)<br />
degree class and strong employability skills that you have<br />
developed at university.<br />
Nine core employability skills are listed on the next two pages<br />
with some suggestions of how to build and improve expertise<br />
<br />
expected for many roles as well, such as strong numerical and<br />
<br />
Recruiters tell us that they are generally impressed with the<br />
ability of Oxford students to display these skills compared<br />
to other graduates. However, they stress the importance for<br />
Oxford students to develop and demonstrate skills that are not<br />
necessarily developed through their academic work - especially<br />
commercial awareness and team-work.<br />
To support you, The Careers Service and OUSU run a number<br />
of programmes to enhance your experience and work-relevant<br />
skills, including insight schemes, internships and personal<br />
development programmes. These are outlined on pages 33-39.<br />
Julie Mabberley<br />
Chairman, Community Voice<br />
on Planning (CoVoP)<br />
Community Voice on Planning is<br />
a charity that seeks to support<br />
sustainable development.<br />
It does so by informing<br />
Government policy development and supporting local<br />
communities with planning issues.<br />
A Student Consultancy team helped them with the<br />
strategic challenge: how to engage with younger<br />
people to increase their understanding of planning<br />
and ways of influencing development in the future?<br />
Julie Mabberley, Chairman of CoVoP, was looking for<br />
real value from her consultancy team:<br />
“Although there was no charge for the service, we<br />
invested time to brief the project and support the<br />
group as it progressed. It was important to get<br />
something really useful back and we did.”<br />
“We were impressed by the commitment of the<br />
students and their grasp of our challenge, as well as<br />
the way they applied their critical thinking skills to our<br />
project. We could also see that they worked pretty<br />
well together as a team.”<br />
30<br />
www.careers.ox.ac.uk