INFORMATION FOR SPECIFIC GROUPS

We try to cater for all Kent students whatever their needs: Mature Students, Students with Disabilities, International Students, Ethnic Minority Students, Women Students. Sometimes this may affect your career choice - for example, mature students often enter public sector jobs and the helping careers where greater life experience may be to their advantage.

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT WORKBOOKS

• "Career Management Skills" - a profiling and self-awareness booklet for 1st Year students. See our web version
• "Postgraduates and Contract Researchers" - a booklet specifically for these groups. See our Web version.

Making Decisions

The computer programs below allow you to put in a number of factors on what you want in a career (such as helping others, promotion prospects) and will give suggestions of possible careers which might match these. Regard these as useful suggestions rather than gospel truth, but they should bring up some possibilities that you haven't considered before.

Prospects Planner www.prospects.ac.uk/links/Pplanner is a powerful program to help you choose a graduate career. It allows you to answer questions about your values and interests and then to relate these to a database of hundreds of occupations to get suggestions on appropriate careers.

Alternatively Careers Explorer is a quick and simple program which will also suggest graduate careers

Talk to graduates already working in your chosen career area. You can use the Kent Alumni Careers Network to contact a graduate directly. Work shadowing (spending a day with) a person in the career you are considering is the next best thing to actually doing a job, to find out what it is like. If you have done this, you will come across as much better prepared at interviews.

Of course, the other important part in making decisions is discussing it with other people. Friends, family and tutors can all play an important part here . The Duty Careers Adviser is available every day without an appointment for a short discussion and can often help to inject reality into your ideas for example, pointing out that you may need to fund your way through a postgraduate course to enter your chosen career.

Taking Action

This is the final process of career planning. It involves:

• Finding out about the EMPLOYERS that offer the types of jobs you are interested in.
• Search our VACANCY DATABASE
• Preparing APPLICATIONS and attending INTERVIEWS
• Perhaps taking APTITUDE TESTS and attending SELECTION CENTRES

First look at the Timeline, which gives you an idea of what you should be doing when during your time at UKC in terms of Career Planning.

Sometimes you may have to return to previous stages in the process, for example, if you are not able to get into your first choice career