How I did it and how you can do it too.

Following on from my last post of 2014 in which I spoke about the importance of putting in the work now to help with your future I have been actively looking for work experience placements and internships that will help me with my future career goals.

In order to fully maximise my chances of being successful in my search I decided to visit my university's careers service for some advice. If you are currently a student I highly recommend using your careers service, these people are paid to help us students find jobs and so you may as well take advantage of them while you can.

When I visited the office for some general career advice I spotted an advertisement for a social media internship, in partnership with my university,  with a charity that helps young people to create a more democratic environment in schools. As this role combines two of my main loves: Social media and Politics I knew that it would be perfect for me, I knew that the only problem was how I would effectively communicate my enthusiasm for the role.

During my meeting with my adviser, I said that I wanted to apply for this internship and she offered to help me sort out my CV and personal statement. So I booked another appointment for the following week and took with me my current CV. My adviser basically told me that I would have to completely rewrite my CV to fit in with the job role by showcasing the skills that they were specifically looking for in their person specification. 

I found this advice very insightful and so I looked through a few templates she showed me and thought of all of the examples of my skills that I could actually prove I had. So this involved a lot of thinking about how I could apply the skills I learnt from working at McDonald's and Primark and relate that to a social media position- which is as difficult as it sounds.

After a lot of drafts and editing I finally had both a CV and supporting statement that I was proud of and was so excited to hear that I had been offered an interview for the following week. So at this stage I knew there was only one hurdle between me and my dream job. So in order to prepare for me interview I revisited the careers office (I'm quite a regular there now) and also took out a few interview tips books from the library in order to feel as prepared as possible. 

The interview itself was not as scary as I thought it would be, I've never been interviewed by more than one person at a time before so it was quite daunting when I learnt that there would be two people interviewing me. I think the main two things that helped me to be offered the role was the fact that I took print outs of my most popular blog posts to let them understand more of who I am and also my writing style. I also asked questions that proved I had a genuine interest in the organisation after having researched their website.

All in all the main points that I have learnt from this experience and would like to share with you are:

1. If you are at university USE your careers service. If you aren't a student sites like Go Think Big offer tonnes of useful career advice.

2. When applying for a role, alter or rewrite your CV for each role  making sure that you highlight the key competencies or skills that are in the job description

3. Make sure that you quantify your skills or experiences as much as possible. My old CV said that 'I served customers quickly at McDonald's', whereas my new CV says that 'I managed time efficiently by completing orders within the 300 recommended seconds.

4. Research the company that you are applying for as much as you can in order to be able to fully explain why you would fit in. I would also recommend researching your interviewers too, if you are given their names. Knowing a little about my researchers definitely helped me. Doing such research can help you to ask insightful questions at the end of the interview

5. If you can, take proof of what is on your CV just so they know you are genuine and also that you care enough about the interview to go the extra mile.

6.Just be confident in your ability to do the role that you are applying for. Doing this helped me remain motivated when drafting my CV for the third time and also calmed me during the interview because I knew that I have the ability. If you don't believe in yourself nobody else will.

Do you have any failsafe interview/job hunting tips?
Let me know if you do, I could always do with more!

The John Lewis Effect

Last week John Lewis blessed us all with their latest Christmas advert. This year's ad features Monty the Penguin or should I say #MontyThePenguin and follows him on his quest for love. SPOILER ALERT it ends with the revelation that Monty is actually a young boy's favourite cuddly toy and not his pet. 

John Lewis Christmas adverts have told us the stories of the Hare and the Bear, The Snowman willing to risk his life for his love and the young boy who was so excited to give his parents their gift. The ads are loved not only for their heartwarming stories but also the amazing soundtracks. This year's features the beautiful voice of Tom Odell and his Beatles cover and last year's Snowpatrol cover by Lily Allen helped to reboot her career after her hiatus though she later admitted to only earning £8000 for that song.

Over the last few years John Lewis have managed to turn their Christmas adverts into an anticipated event  that is so much more than them simply trying to sell individual items to consumers. Marketing is a career that I am interested in pursuing after university and a phrase that stuck in my mind from Google's head of Marketing Nishma Robb last month at a careers event was that marketing is all about 'Purpose not product'. 

This is a concept that John Lewis have well and truly taken on. They have found a way to make people become excited about Christmas on the whole and it's 'true meaning' focussing on relationships and the emotions surrounded around giving and receiving gifts rather than how much money you spend on specific consumer items.

I just think that it is amazing that John Lewis have been able to engage the British Public by having everyone talking about their advert. #Montythepenguin was trending on Twitter for days and raised enough awareness to have over 12 million YouTube views in less than a week. I can only imagine the increase in traffic John Lewis would have received from this campaign with people looking to find gifts that will 'Give someone the Christmas they've been dreaming of'.

 I would love to one day to be part of a process that helps to create a campaign much like this one day, and to find out what it takes to capture the hearts of the nation.

Getting into the media

So today I attended my 7th media related event with Go Think Big and I loved every minute of it. Go Think Big is an organization devoted to helping young people get a foot on the career ladder in the somewhat elusive media industry.

Since secondary school I have known that I want to work in the media industry but I have struggled to be able to pinpoint the exact career that I want to aim for after university. My determination was massively fuelled by my form tutor telling me that the industry was very difficult to get into and that I should consider other career options.

Sometimes I feel like Go Think Big was created for just me, they offer numerous work experience opportunities, skill days, networking events etc. They have helped me to gain access to a lot of professionals doing the kind of jobs that I am interested in, ranging from advertising, marketing, PR, journalism, digital, radio, HR and many more. I was actually first introduced to the site by Lucie Cave, the editor-in-chief of Heat magazine back in December 2012 at the Clothes Show when I asked her how she got her job.

Today's event was about learning about the job roles of four individuals representing Journalism, Radio, Digital and Marketing. The speakers then gave advice about how we (the audience) should go about getting a job like theirs. I am going to make this as brief as possible and stick to the one main lesson that I learnt from each speaker.

The first was Claire Maxted, Editor of Trail Running magazine

*The most important thing that I learnt from Claire is that when trying to get work experience, if people don't respond to your email, send them a few more but if that doesn't work just pick up the phone. It is a lot easier to ignore an email than it is a real life human being on the phone.

The second speaker was Paul Sylvester, Head of presentation at Absolute Radio

*Whilst working in radio isn't something that I have personally considered, I loved when he said that Radio presenters see their career as their life rather than a job, a good radio presenter will be thinking about material for their show 24/7 even when they are not on air and that when they are at work they don't feel like they are working. This is the dream for my future career!

The third speaker was Kieren Puffett, Editor at Parkers

*Kieren spoke of the importance of networking and backed up what he was saying with the statistic that 70% of all jobs are filled by networking! So it's definitely about who you know and not what you know

The fourth and final speaker was Katy Miller, Senior Digital Marketing Executive and Bauer.

*My favourite piece of advice from Katy was that the best way to shape my career would be to search my dream job, look at the person specification and then work on gaining the skills needed through work experience etc.

All in all I loved my day today and I have been inspired to apply for more work experience placements to get my foot in the door!