How to make any university experience attractive to employers?

The primary reason the majority of students attend university is to enhance their job prospects. This is becoming a little easier as the graduate job market is showing a slow (well snail-paced) recovery; however, the growth in the number of graduate job applications received by Britain's top employers is still outpacing the growth in vacancies. Statistics like this fill me with sheer panic! How do you improve your chances of being one of the ‘chosen ones,’ and not joining the benefits queue? Make yourself EMPLOYABLE. Some students believe that to make themselves stand-out, to employers, that they have to do amazing things while at university such as climbing mountains and sailing around the world. While I praise these people for their efforts, employers want to see that you have transferable skills. This can be shown through any university experience using the STARR method.

I am going to show you how you can take any university experience and make it ‘attractive’ to employers using the method below.

Experience: Working part-time in a supermarket

Usually the majority of students will write something along the lines of this in their C.V.

Candidate A

‘2010-Present Checkout Operative at Valco Ltd

Duties:

·         Stacking the shelves

·         Facing the shelves

·         Processing stock

·         Serving customers’

Yawn! First of all this is extremely dull and you are just listing the tasks you have done. The employer must read hundreds/thousands of applications like this. What SKILLS do you have to offer?

Using the STARR method, I would write it like this:

Candidate B

‘2010-Present Checkout Operative at Valco Ltd

I worked as a sales assistant to help me fund my way through university. I am a very enthusiastic and positive person, who worked well with the public and other members of the Valco team. It was my job to be commercially aware of what customers wanted, at different times of year, to make sure their needs were met. This can be shown through the example below.

S- A customer came in looking for a specific washing powder as she has sensitive skin.

T- There was none on the shelf so I had the task of finding her the product.

A-I asked the customer to wait while I looked out the back for more stock. There was none available so I looked for a suitable alternative and searched the database for the next delivery.

R-I explained to the customer the next delivery would be in on Monday. As she needed the product then, she accepted the alternative and went away happy.

R-If I was doing this again, I would do it quicker as she has to wait a long time.

I also worked in all departments, showing my flexibility and willingness to take a 'hands-on' approach. I worked in a busy environment, managing staff breaks and queue times effectively through excellent time-management skills.’

This is much more ‘attractive’ to an employer as it shows you have transferable skills which are:

·         Interpersonal skills:

·         Communication

·         Teamwork

·         Commercial awareness

·         Proactive

·         Initiative

·         Flexibility

·         Time-management skills

It is a very simple technique that can improve your C.V. drastically. I always put myself in the employers shoes ‘would I hire me, reading my C.V.? If your answer to this question is a big fat NO, then you need to do something about it. It is not what you have done at university that will get you that job; it is how you put it across to employers.