The role of university-based graduate career advice centres is to help graduates develop their interests, job prospects and career options thus preparing them for entry into the job market.

Even if you’re still engaged in studies and haven’t thought much about searching for a job after university, it’s never too soon to seek out graduate career advice. It can provide a wealth of information about potential employment opportunities and help you steer your final year of school in the right direction, and give your education a real world focus that it may not have had up until now.

Why Do I Need Graduate Career Advice?

Graduate career advice helps you formulate a clear, objective assessment of your career options and provides assistance and direction so you can reach your goals. Most graduate career advice centres offer a range of options to help you develop and achieve your professional goals. If you seek graduate career advice while you’re still in university, you will learn how to make the most of your degree, and you’ll have time to acquire the additional knowledge and skills that will help you land that dream job.

While graduate career advice services may differ in their specific offerings, below are some of the key services usually offered under graduate career advice.

Personality / Aptitude Tests

Graduate career advisors often provide free and confidential psychometric tests to assess candidates’ aptitudes and interests. These tests typically identify your strengths and help you focus on making appropriate career choices. Personality tests can reveal your preferred communication style and key motivators, which in turn can provide pointers toward the career that suits you best.

Career Guidance

Graduate career advice is often centred on helping you explore a range of fields and job types so you can better understand your options. Not only do you get graduate career advice about specific industries, but you’ll also get typical job profiles and practical information on what it’s like to work in a particular field. Some services will also provide you with contact information for experts in the field you are interested in so those experts can give you graduate career advice from a real world perspective.

Application Assistance

Graduate career advice services can help you when preparing applications for part-time jobs and, internships, as well as full-time job placements. Most graduate career advice centres can provide direction on how to identify job listings that are right for you and help you follow up with applications. More specifically, a graduate career advice service can help you interpret the finer points of a job advertisement or description, answer questions on application forms, and ensure that your application package is complete and professional.

Interviewing Tips

A key benefit of getting graduate career advice is that it prepares you to face tough interview situations. Working with experts at a graduate career advice centre before that all-important interview means you’ll be ready to impress the recruiter / potential employer with your skills, knowledge, and presentation abilities. Graduate career The advice will helps you focus on your core strengths in a positive, professional manner and can also include coaching on how to handle potentially stressful telephone interviews.

How to Write a CV

Graduate career advice sometimes includes CV writing assistance to ensure your CV is in line with your career objectives. Most graduate career advice careers services recommend that those who are job searching maintain a dynamic, online CV, which enables you to easily tailor your CV template to a specific job and gets you noticed by thousands of recruiters and employers throughout the UK. It’s a good idea to have ask your graduate career advice service them to review your CV before you distribute it, which could give you an edge over other candidates.

In summary, graduate career advice can make the difference between a lengthy and unproductive job search and securing a coveted position in the field of your choice. Besides providing a wealth of information on the career planning process, graduate career advisors can introduce you to experts and professionals in your area of interest.

About Author

Peter Whitehead is commissioned to write articles on behalf of iProfile, the preferred CV template. iProfile brings the online CV into the 21st Century. Tips & advice vary from CV writing to negotiating a pay rise.

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Career change and career transition are real concerns nowadays. People lose or give up their jobs for various reasons. Today’s aggressive, performance-oriented business ethos mean that career change and career transition happen to a lot of people; this is quite unlike before when one could get into a job and stay in it for life.

Considering a Career Change

If the change is a voluntary one, then the person undergoing the career change should take as much care as possible. Not only is one’s income-less (or non-existent) during such a time, but change itself always puts stresses on a person as he or she strives to steer his life in a new direction.

Nevertheless, not all is doom and gloom: the time spent between careers offers a chance for value appraisal and career assessment. The shock of finding one’s self adrift may provide a good impetus to accomplish a useful task that has often been set aside because of lack of time or lack of motivation. Indeed, once in the middle of a career change and career transition, you may find yourself exploring new and better career paths that you thought were closed to you.

Marketing One’s Self to Potential Employers

In the midst of your career change and career transition, you must carefully assess what job you wish to take on next. You must list down your credentials and skills, your interests, and your goals (house, car, salary grade, position, prestige, etc). Your credentials and skills will be your basis for assessing your worth to potential employers. Your interests will dictate the direction that you can possibly take. Your goals will be your basis for choosing the specific direction that you will take.

The time spent reevaluating one’s career direction is followed by a time of writing cover letters, updating one’s resume, leveraging whatever influence one has on people in a network that might help one get into a new job or completely different line of work (which is one reason why it’s nice to cultivate friends). It’s not necessary to have experience when shifting into a whole new profession, as long as you stay educated, can play up your strengths to the recruiter, and transfer the necessary social skills to your new setting.

As you sit down to write your resume, it is helpful to remember something that salesmen and marketers know but others often overlook: you must be able to sell yourself in order to profit in the job market. To increase your value to potential employers, recruitment agencies or headhunters, you must do your best to highlight your value so you will always remain on top of the recruitment heap. Only then can you be sure of a successful career change and career transition.

About Author

For more information, please visit: Career Training and Career Transition

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Career change in the Australian context
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The popularity of the book “Blink” underscores the importance of first impressions in any business dealing. The premise of the book is that many decisions are, in fact, snap judgments—but that those judgments often hold true. Given this fact of modern business life, you’ll want to do everything possible not to torpedo your job application from the start.

Obviously, the first step in any successful job hunt is sending a resume—either by e-mail or by snail-mail. You want a resume that is complete, yet concise…factual and not fraudulent…impressive and not insufferable. In addition, you’ll want to craft a resume that will not end up in the reject pile as soon as it lands on an executive’s desk.

It is critical that you compose a resume that can withstand an initial “scan,” whether that scan is by human eyes or electronic ones. While it may not be possible to make your resume “scan-proof,” you can certainly increase your chances of getting your resume past the initial scan.
The Importance of the Scan

As a job seeker, you might be wondering why so much emphasis is placed on resume scanning to begin with. In order to understand this, you must place yourself in the role of the employer or recruiting manager. He or she has to work through a pile of resumes that may be 300 resumes-high. Filling a particular position may be just one of dozens of other things on the daily to-do list. As a result, time is precious to the hiring executive, and he or she must do everything possible to make the process as time-efficient as possible.
The First Look

While you may have poured your heart and soul into your resume…working for hours to perfect it…you need to understand that an employer will spend little time scanning it. In fact, he or she will probably spend only about ten seconds looking at your resume!

During that incredibly short period of time, it’s important that you grab his or her attention. In many cases, that means clearly stating your career objective at the beginning of your resume…making your applicable job skills stand out from the text…providing a coherent history of your experience, along with any special honors you have received. Keep in mind that the employer is looking for those positions you’ve held and those job skills you’ve acquired that are directly relevant to the position being offered. If you fill your resume with inconsequential material…information that doesn’t have anything to do with your qualifications for a specific job…your resume will, in all likelihood, be quickly discarded to make room for those resumes that fit the bill.

If your resume is long and wieldy…if it is difficult to read and nearly impossible to follow…if it is poorly formatted…or if it contains spelling errors and grammatical mistakes…it will not survive this initial scan.
The Finer Points

In addition to these general considerations, there are some finer points that need to be considered when you draft your resume. For instance, you have to consider the fact that a recruiter will be looking at your resume to see if your latest work experience matches the type of work you’d be doing in the position that’s advertised. If you are applying for a job as a television producer and you have not produced a show in ten years, you’ll probably have trouble winning that coveted TV news producing job.

Next, the hiring manager will also look to see what kinds of companies you’ve worked for. In other words, if your resume reflects a history of working for Fortune 500 companies, you have a greater chance of landing another Fortune 500 job. Like attracts like—and if you’ve been working for major corporations, the hiring manager at a large company is far more likely to hire you.

The recruiter will also look to see if you have a demonstrated record of achievement. For instance, does your resume show a history of promotions? Has your work won prestigious awards, either at the local or national level? Has your work been recognized for special honors at your current place of employment? The more honors you list in your resume, the more likely it will pass through that initial scan with ease.

Finally, a number of employers are greatly interested in where you received your education. An Ivy League credential can work magic during the job application process. In some cases, an employer may be more inclined to invite you in for an interview if you both attended the same college or completed the same graduate degree program. While experience usually trumps education during the initial scan, that’s not to say that the education section of your resume is not important.
When Computers Do the Scanning

In this technological age, it is highly important that you produce a resume that can withstand high-tech scrutiny. Since a number of employers rely on specialized software that screens resumes for specific words and phrases, you want to customize your resume as much as possible to the position you’re applying for. If the position is in sales and you’ve had extensive sales experience, be sure to mention the word “sales” throughout your resume. If the advertised job involves supervising other employees, make sure that your supervisory experience is indicated extensively within the text of your work history. Before you write your resume, you may want to brainstorm, producing a list of words and phrases that would be associated with the position you’re seeking. That way, you can be sure to insert all relevant words into the text of your resume, increasing the chances that you will be called in for an interview.
Put Your Resume to the Scan Test

If you are not sure how your resume would survive a scan, it’s a good idea to test it with one of your colleagues. Have an associate whose opinion you value take a ten-second look at your resume. In all likelihood, any missteps you’ve made will literally jump off the page, giving you all the information you need for a quick and effective rewrite.

This article was written by the certified professional resume writers of Resume Services(http://www.AccuroResumes.com/). The writers at AccuroResumes will help create a perfect professional resume suited to your best needs. See why thousands of people are discovering the benefits of a perfect professional resume written by AccuroResumes.com. You are guaranteed to be 100% satisfied with your new, professional resume or, your money back. Reproductions of this article are encouraged, but must include a link pointing to http://www.AccuroResumes.com/.

About Author

The writers at AccuroResumes will help create a perfect professional resume suited to your best needs. See why thousands of people are discovering the benefits of a perfect professional resume written by AccuroResumes.com. You are guaranteed to be 100% satisfied with your new, professional resume or, your money back. Reproductions of this article are encouraged, but must include a link pointing to http://www.AccuroResumes.com/.

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If you have just left school and are trying to find a way to start your career then you might find that it’s much more difficult than you imagined. There are however quite a few things that you can do to land that dream career so that you’re proud and happy with your job.

Things you can do

Later on we’re going to mention the possibility of hiring professional career advisors to help you decide what sort of job to do, however before we show you how to find mentors we will look at some of the important things that you can do yourself.

Getting a job and building a career is ultimately your own responsibility, even if you do decide to hire help you will still be required to put in plenty of effort. It’s not all up to the career advisor to get you your dream job. You must think about the type of job that you would like to do, and start planning how you are going to achieve it. If you can find your own way then you will find it much more rewarding.

Keep an eye on job vacancies in your local paper or on the internet, if you find any that match your career plan then apply to them even if you already have a job. Try to build relationships with people that can help you to achieve your goals.
To stand any chance of landing a good job you need to be seen as a form of expert in the field, to make this possible you should make sure that you communicate as much as possible. Tell people what you are doing, and don’t be afraid to take the credit when you do something right. The idea is to try and build your personal brand, some way to differentiate you from the hundreds of other applications.

The most important thing that you can do yourself is take a personal interest in getting the job done, don’t wait for people to come looking for you. Make sure that you’re the first to do everything, this way you stand a much better chance of climbing up the career ladder as quickly as possible.

Hiring Help

Once you’ve done all of the things that you can do to help yourself you might like to consider hiring a career advisor, there are a number of different executive coaching experts all over Australia, many of which can offer very useful services.

One of the most popular career advice websites is CareerSavant which can be found at www.careersavant.com.au. This site is wonderful because it puts you in touch with the business experts that you so desperately need to see, the cost of the service is very reasonable, and considering what you get should make all the difference to your career.

When using the services of CareerSavant you can either find a mentor through the website and then pay using them as an agency, or you can also look at private listings.

www.careersavant.com.au

About Author

Clarke Simmons has been a career counsellor based in Adelaide for the past 12 years. Having guided a large number of young people during their formative years Clarke now uses the internet to disseminate the knowledge and information he has gathered over the course of his career.

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