Current Undergraduates
Planning a Strategy
- Yourself
- Location
- Size of Company
- Industry Sector
- Type of Work
Many students choose the Cambridge course because it allows them to defer making specific career choices until the third year. By nature, our students are either less decisive or, alternatively, prefer to give these matters more consideration before limiting their choices. Given the changeable nature of the economy and increased flexibility required within jobs our students can be at an advantage. However, when it comes to applying for work experience many students are at a loss as to how to start whittling down the huge number of potential companies to a manageable number.
Most students prefer to be near their home for convenience and cost purposes, however a small number every year prefer to be away from home. The most common location is Cambridge, due to the ease of obtaining accommodation and local company links with the Department. In general, companies will prefer students who reside near them, as they know beforehand that there will be few accommodation problems.
There are advantages to working with larger companies. They tend to offer more placements and they have a wider range of opportunities. Conversely the competition is greater, they tend to establish links with specialist courses and some have rigid, inflexible recruitment policies for student placements, e.g. restricting the opportunities to third years only. Smaller companies can often offer a more interesting experience to the first year students as their size allows you to gain familiarity with the workforce more quickly, you will be involved in a greater range of activities and most importantly you can often negotiate directly with key people rather than via the administrative structures that large companies often operate.
You may decide to target a certain sector, such as Aerospace or Automative. Invariably these two are the most popular choices, but they do not always offer the greatest number of opportunities for vacation work. You may decide on a sector because you think it will be your eventual career choice. On the other hand, you would be well advised to check the economic buoyancy of a sector and this may well be a better indicator regarding the possibility of finding work. Newspapers like the 'Financial Times' and the Business section of the 'broadsheets' provide up-to-date information on sectors as well as individual companies.
Newspapers can be accessed via the World Wide Web.
Some students may wish to experience practical work as this forms a very limited part of the course at CUED. Learning to operate machines, making things and maintain them are all useful ways of acquiring skills and understanding how the design, manufacture and durability of products correspond. Working on the "shopfloor" or in a workshop, you may gain a very useful "fly-on-the-wall" appreciation of the workforce's attitudes towards management, which you are unlikely to get when you become part of the latter. These are just four examples, but when attempting to sift any database you will need to be able to select organisations which will be susceptible to your requirements, and you may well have your own criteria.
- Want to know more?
Jobsearch Strategies: for an alternative view on this, check out Prospects UK, the national Careers Service site.