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Farah Chowdhury

March 23rd, 2016

Undergraduates – How to decide on a career

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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Farah Chowdhury

March 23rd, 2016

Undergraduates – How to decide on a career

0 comments

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

This might surprise you (or not!) but not everyone at LSE knows what they want to do when they leave. As careers consultants we see many students a day in our one-to-one appointments who would like support with deciding on their career plans. Perhaps you recognise yourself as being one of these students. There’s a number of things you can do to help you decide on your career if so:

  • Attend our careers events – remember we’re open all summer and will be running careers events again after exams so check CareerHub for the most up to date list as well!
  • Book a one-to-one appointment with one of us to discuss your career thoughts (logon to CareerHub either at 9:30am the day before if you’d like a morning appointment or from 9:30am on the day for afternoon appointments).
  • Check out graduate destinations – we collect data which summarises the employer names and job titles of alumni from your course. Have a look at our website to find out where your course could take you; this can be a good ideas generation exercise. Of course, the list is by no means exhaustive and you would be recommended to look back at your values, skills and motivations to see if these destinations even fit with what you are looking for.
  • Use the Career Builder tool we have on our website which will guide you to look at your skills, experience, values and motivations to help get to know yourself and, in turn, help you make some decisions. We’d recommend supplementing this tool with a visit to LSE Careers!
  • Complete a career matching tool – you’ll answer questions about your preferences and be presented with a list of career options that match your answers. Some suggestions may be useful, and some less so, but use your reaction to the ideas to learn more about your preferences! Try TargetJobs for example.
  • Consider your interests – perhaps through considering your values and motivations you realise you would like a career closely matched to your interests. Consider researching an interest, and finding the types of opportunities and sectors that could fulfil your interests professionally. For example if you’re interested in children’s issues, you might be able to work in education (through all age groups), at the policy level in government, in youth work, social work, research, the charity sector, international organisations, to name but a few. It’s a great exercise to do with friends to see what ideas you can generate.
  • Do some research – perhaps you have some idea what it is you would like to do but need to find out more. Then start your sector research on the Employment Sectors section of our website.
  • Speak to people in your sector – this will help you to learn more about a sector you might be interested in, and professionals and LSE alumni will often be willing to speak with you or email you about their career, their day to day work and their working environment. Try approaching people on LinkedIn or through the LSE Alumni Mentoring Network.

These suggestions can help you move forward with your decisions, but don’t look at these in isolation, book an appointment at LSE Careers to discuss your findings and research so we can help guide you to your next step!

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Farah Chowdhury

Posted In: Career planning | LSE Careers

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