Video Transcripts
Marie
Well, now that I work as a careers adviser it has been really helpful to work for different types of organisations, both to see how different types of jobs – what’s involved in different types of jobs - but also to pick up on different company cultures. My main responsibility working at Oxford Brookes is to the whole student body, so whoever needs help in anything to do with getting a job, doing a CV; or in a wider way, you know, maybe wanting to change universities or to change course, often we can advise on that as well.
I also have a special responsibility for the healthcare school so I am particularly interested in what’s going on in the NHS - and there’s always something going on in the NHS, there’s always another reorganisation! I think there’s now very much a recognition that the student is the expert. You know, we hand over the resources, the websites, we comment on what’s happening with an up-to-date employment situation, what employers are looking for, how to prepare for interviews, but in the end, the student, when they’re armed with all of that information, they are the expert and they’re the people that take those decisions.
You’ve got to be interested in people and you’ve got to actually want to help. But not to do everything – as I say, in the end, students are adults and I think you’ve got to be very accepting that they in the end make their own decisions. You’re just part of the process. I don’t think I would ever say, “I’ve seen five people today and they all wanted to do the same thing,” because everybody’s unique – you never know who’s going to walk in and what their situation is so I love my job.
I must say that I enjoy helping people and that’s a fairly obvious thing to say. On a more selfish note, I think one of my big values is working with a small team of people who I know are supportive and I suppose a bit like me; we all want to do the best we can for people.
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Dan
I left school at 16 and gained an apprenticeship in Portsmouth Naval Base where I worked for 7 years. And then I decided I’d like to enter higher education as a mature student so I went to Ruskin College for a year then did a degree at Oxford Brookes University followed by a PhD. So my entry into the Careers Centre was a roundabout route, yeah.
The technological change that the internet has brought is a big change; the other big change for the Careers Centre is the sheer number of students that seems to be going up and up and up all the time. So it is a challenging job; it’s a busy job at times.
I enjoy working with my colleagues in the Careers Centre who come from really diverse backgrounds. The students that we engage with – that’s what we’re there for really, working with them, helping them to see what careers are open to them.
The Careers Centre I think gives the impression to students and other staff at Oxford Brookes University that we’re a strong team, that we work together, that if we’re not the person to help them, then we can refer them to another member of the team or ask another member of the team if they can refer, so it gives the impression that we’re a strong team unit and that we work together as a strong team unit.
Traits that are needed for a successful career within Careers: organisation, time planning, people skills are very important, communication skills both verbal and written. A sense of humour, as well, is very important – you deal with such a diverse range of people that sometimes you need to just inject a bit of humour because, as I’ve said, it can be time-pressured, it can be quite stressful at times, so a sense of humour’s an important trait, I feel.
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Lorna
Well I’ve been here for ten years now - which seems unbelievable to me, actually! – but prior to that I worked as a lecturer in another college which is now part of Brookes so in a way it’s like being at Brookes for 12 years, I guess.
I think the key personality train for any good careers advisor or for careers guidance work is curiosity . I think you have to have a really big interest in people. There’s a wide variety of courses that we run so we can be working with anybody from [courses in ] nursing to engineering to architecture [to] History of art. And of course the arts courses I really like because that’s where I started my educational career, really.
I really love working with students and it’s a very privileged job because you’re working with people who are in a very exciting period of their life and looking forward to changes and moving on so it’s very exciting.
We come from a wide variety of backgrounds – I mean, my background is not as a careers advisor; it’s from lecturing. I’ve worked, as I’ve said before, in everywhere from the City to the public sector and I think what you want in careers advisors are people who have a broad base of experience. I think the best advice that I would give students is don’t ignore the opportunities that just come up and don’t be afraid of taking them. I’ve taken lots of opportunities for things I thought, I’m not sure I can do that, but I’ve done it anyway, even though I might’ve been quite scared about it.
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Mark
My career started off after I finished my degree when I was working for BT as what they call a User Support Manager. And then I had a mad change of career into catering and actually was a Restaurant Manager for country house hotels which brought me down here when I worked for one of the colleges – one of the Oxford colleges – and somehow managed to get an admin job, or a course admin job, for Oxford University.
Qualities for a careers counsellor are many. Everything from being organised to being able to plan, and plan ahead, to being able to research and keep up to date with what’s happening in the employment sector, to listening, to being objective and impartial, and also to be friendly and welcoming. And I think probably the crucial thing is to be able to identify a need. Sometimes they’ve had a bad experience or they may be unhappy, and they offload a whole load of information
It’s [a case of] picking your way through that to try and figure out what exactly is it that student needs
I’ve been doing a bit more work with international students over the last 12 months and that’s something I’d like to develop more of. Generally the plans of international students are to continue their studies and maybe do postgraduate courses, some will want to work, and some go directly home. If they want to work, then we will try to help them find employment or advise them on the best way to find employment here in the UK. What makes it fulfilling is that you don’t always get lots of feedback but when you do get the feedback you just think yeah, I’ve helped them, I’ve helped the student get a job. They’ve got the first rung, the first start on the career ladder, and they’ll fly from now. I think the most satisfying is when people say, “Without you, I wouldn’t’ve got the job.”
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Karen
Before becoming a careers counsellor I had a long career in the civil service, and before that I had lots of odd jobs – I actually worked in Australia for a few years – but my main career was in the civil service. I’d say my greatest achievement was taking the decision to leave that career and do a degree as a mature student , which led to this job. Because I realised when I was in my old career that to progress any further I’d need to get some further qualifications. So my greatest achievement was getting a degree in my 40s.
We all muck in, we all do bits of everything. You’ll often find the Head of Careers on Reception or making the tea for visitors. But the formality of that is that we all have responsibilities for different academic schools. We’ve become more business-focused because we’ve changed the focus from being what bight have been seen as a ‘problem’ service or a place where people went if they had a problem, and we’ve become more dynamic and tried to become a service students just use as a matter of course.
We have a great professional network called AGCAS and we have an email link with them so if we have an odd question from a student about a career, we can email and say, “Has anybody come across this before?” and we always get lots of replies, so it’s a really useful network for us to have.
It’s definitely a fulfilling career. The best bit is that you meet lots of different people, you’ll hear people’s stories and you have to be interested in what people have to say. It’s the only career, actually I’ve ever had – and I’ve finally found it in my 40s! – where I don’t dread coming to work every day. I really look forward to it.
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Sue
I’ve worked in the public sector, the private sector, I’ve worked in manufacturing, I’ve done jobs I probably didn’t see the value of at the time and would have dismissed, like working behind the bar in a club – those kinds of jobs. But then I’ve also worked in HR in graduate recruitment, then I moved to the other side of it and switched from recruiting to placing as a recruitment consultant, so that was quite an interesting balance looking at both sides. And then I worked with students, placing them in part-time work, and I’ve then moved into the careers service now and really enjoy the guidance and preparation side of it, and the networking and putting employers in touch with whoever might be useful to them in the University.
There’s no typical careers counsellor; they come from all sorts of backgrounds which is what’s needed really in a good careers counsellor. You can’t come straight out of university and go straight into careers counselling; you need experience of a variety of roles, you need to be working in industry. So we have careers counsellors here that have trained in, as I say, manufacturing, engineering; we have a careers counsellor that studied history of art then worked in the City, a really wide variety of roles. So no, there’s no typical careers counsellor.
Team working’s really important. If I’m dealing with an individual employer I then need to be able to feed that back to the team, so I need to have an awareness of what everybody’s role is, where they may be interested in the employer that I’ve been speaking to and how they might be able to expand the relationship and work with them. So [it’s about] information sharing within the team and recognising everybody’s role.
I really enjoy working with students – I meet some fantastic students who achieve amazing things and go out and really I think they’re really very valuable to society and to employers, actually. We turn out some great graduates from here.
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