Career planning

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Graduate Career Explorer

Graduate Career Explorer is a new way to plan your career, it shows you what careers your degree can lead to and where the opportunities are in the UK.

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Planning your career

At Huddersfield we've created a step-by-step guide to make planning your career as straight forward as possible. This takes you from Exploring at the start, to Developing a career at the end. The process follows the clockwise direction of the large arrows but you'll notice that there are smaller counter-clockwise arrows too. Career planning is rarely linear or completely smooth so the smaller arrows indicate that at any point you can circle back to the previous stage and rethink your approach. Reflecting upon how things are going is important at every stage, which is why Reflection is at the centre. Resilience is also central too as you need courage, grit and positivity to power through the obstacles.

This model describes the route to take during your exploration of careers and application to jobs: explore, decide, prepare, apply and develop
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Explore

Not made a career decision yet? Don't worry, there's a world of possibilities open to you.

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Decide

Choosing between different career ideas? Then there are lots of things you can do to make making a decision easier.

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Prepare

Got an idea of what you want to do but not sure how to get there? Let's help you work out the next steps!

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Apply

Ready to start applying? Head this way for help with acing the recruitment process, from CVs to interviews!

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Develop

Thinking of making a career move or simply gaining new skills? These confidence-boosting resources can help!

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Reflection and Resilience

Reflecting on your career journey so far can help you think about how to make better career decisions in the future!

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Explore our career planning self-help guides

An A-Z of all our self-help resources. See the sections above to find resources that would be helpful to you in specific stages of your career planning.

Browse the self-help library

Careers and Employability timelines

The career timelines for each year group provide a useful checklist of actions that you can undertake at each stage of your academic journey to help you to prepare for your future career.

There are some key deadlines in each year of study when applying for different opportunities. It takes time to gain experience, prepare for recruitment processes and explore your career options. The sooner you start, the more career ready you'll be by the time you enter your final year.

We have also included a list of activities, resources and services that we advise you to engage with throughout each academic year to support you on your journey.

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First year career timeline

Looking at what steps you should be taking to improve your employability during first year? Look no further!

Download a copy
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Second year career timeline

In second year and thinking about your next steps? Find our guide below.

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Placement year career timeline

Wondering what steps to take to improve your employability during placement year? Take a look at our timeline!

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Final year career timeline

Thinking about life after graduation? Find our guide on steps to take during final year.

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Careers sector links

Research careers with our directory of websites providing advice, opportunities, events and vacancies, specific to the careers sector of your interest.

Explore career sectors

Huddersfield Graduate Attributes Framework

The 8 Huddersfield Graduate Attributes capture the key skills that employers are looking for. Find out what they are by using this handy guide.

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Huddersfield Graduate Attributes Audit

This easy-to-use worksheet means you can identify relevant examples of graduate attributes for your CV, application form and interview.

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This student can 

Students and graduates tell us about their journey in work so far and what helped them get where they are. 

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Career tools and resources

There are lots of great websites you can use to find new job ideas, track down vacancies and find the careers and companies that suit you. Here's our selection of the top ones: Prospects, TARGETJobs, Gradcracker and Milkround.

For the best of the rest, and those specific job sectors and specialised careers see the Resource Hub.