Getting Started

Whether you’re starting your first year of study or you’re about to graduate, researching your career options is the first step to finding your graduate role.

Knowing yourself

Assessing your skills, values, interests and motivations will help you to clarify your understanding of yourself. Listing your strengths, weaknesses, and the requirements that your career must meet will help you to identify different occupations and sectors that might be of interest you.

To get started you should create a list of what you “Want” and “Don’t want” from your career.

• What motivates you in the workplace?
• Do you want to be helping others or inventing new products?
• What work environment would you prefer?
• Where do you want to be located?

Deciding the answers to these questions should help you narrow down a list of areas and sectors that may be of interest to you.

There are a range of online career tools available that can help you to assess yourself and identify potential career options:

• Prospects Career Planner – a job exploration tool which helps you to identify the careers that may be of interest to you. Register for free and answer the multiple choice questions to match your skills, values and personality to over 400 job profiles.
• The National Careers Service Skills Health Check – a downloadable report available once you have completed at least one of the assessments.

Explore your options

While many opportunities are open to graduates from any degree subject, some may require specialist qualifications and experience. Researching your options early will help you to find relevant experience and gain the transferable skills that employers are looking for.

What can I do with my degree?

Prospects.ac.uk provide a detailed overview of the career paths available to graduates from a range of degree subjects. Select your degree subject from the list to find out what skills are gained from your course and related career options.

TARGETjobs also have guide to your career options per degree subject.  

And Prospects.ac.uk provides detailed job profiles—descriptions of hundreds of popular graduate job roles covering role responsibilities, salary expectations, necessary qualifications and skills that are required.

Don’t forget roughly 60% of graduate jobs are open to graduates of any degree subject, so you don’t have to be limited by what you studied.