Career planning during your studies

You will gain information, skills and capabilities over the course of your studies.

Career planning is a set part of Personal study plan (PSP) work. Working life skills will be developing constantly throughout your studies – sometimes without you even noticing. Independent essays and theses will expand your knowledge, giving you more in-depth knowledge of certain areas than your fellow students.

You can also gain knowledge through other forms of study, such as group work, tasks requiring independent information gathering, seminar presentation, written reports etc.

The themes that are present in working life go hand in hand with study themes.

When planning your studies, you are also planning your future career

Moving from studying to working life can feel like a major change for many. It can often be easier to think about the future after graduation in small chunks, now and then at different stages of your studies.

• To help with this, you can consult your own degree programme’s teaching or guidance staff.
• Degree programmes’ Personal Study Plan (PSP) guidance provides places where you can think about and weigh up your own plans in terms of what you want from the future.
• The University’s Group Guidance page provides up-to-date details of sources of information and groups to support you with career planning.

Familiarising yourself with learning outcomes as a way to identify your own skills

The learning outcomes of courses can help you to piece together and identify what you’ve learnt. What are the objectives of the course, and what about the broader module as a whole, and how can I achieve them?

Often, you will find that your learning has gone far deeper than what was covered by the course itself. In addition to learning about the target phenomenon, you may have learnt about how certain factors can be studied, what relevance they have as a part of the overall whole, and how these observations can be expanded to other, similar, phenomena.

There is plenty of information available about future opportunities, from a wide range of sources – make the most of it!

There are many sources of content at the University, and you can make use of these when broadening your ideas about the opportunities your own future will bring.

Employment days and events organized by your own student association and degree programme allow you access to career cases and job descriptions from different sectors. Visiting lecturers, drawing on their experiences, and fellow students who have already entered the world of work can help you explore different perspectives on events in the surrounding society. When interacting, your conception of society and the different players and functions within it expands as you examine your own thoughts.

Your choices as material for building knowledge

There are many ways to find and explore your own interests outside university, at the same time as making individual choices that are right for you whilst studying. For example, by following print and online media on topics of your choosing, engaging in hobbies, partaking in voluntary activities or taking on summer/part-time work, you can gain perspectives and even experience of areas, jobs or customer groups that interest you.

Grassroots-level experience is often invaluable when developing the same activities later, in an expert role. The knowledge can often be applied well in different jobs, and at some stage you might find that your own future dream job lies in a sector or with an employer whose existence you weren’t even aware of at the start of your studies.

For more information about career planning: career services 

Visit also our career planning self study moodle