Introduction
Our primary role is to help students plan their careers, develop their employability, make informed career choices and reach their goals. This supports the University’s Strategy.
To achieve this, we collaborate with academic departments and employers to help students maximise their time here and enhance their opportunities.
If you have a specific request or can’t find what you need, please contact the Careers Consultant working with your department and we’ll do our best to help.
Services to departments
Our qualified careers professionals work with students at all stages of their degree programme. We'd like your help to encourage students to use our services early in their studies. We know you're often the first person students ask about placements, references, post-degree employment and study options. This section explains how we support your students and how we can work with you. Your department has a named Careers Consultant contact who'll be happy to work with you.
We can help you in many ways
Bespoke careers sessions in departments
We can provide tailored careers sessions focusing on what your students need. Popular topics include preparing for placements and post-graduation employment - covering CVs, applications, interviews, and psychometric testing. We can also run events on career options or finding work experience for students not doing placements. Sessions are designed around your students' needs and scheduled at the most appropriate times for each year group.
Employer-led events
We have excellent relationships with employers and can arrange tailored employer-led events on career options, recruitment methods or specific employability skills like teamwork. Our strong connections with local and national employers mean we can bring in the employers your students want to work for.
Support for students facing challenges
We offer confidential and impartial advice for students who are facing challenges such as changing their course or dealing with disappointing results. Our one-to-one support can help students decide their best course of action.
Gradute network
There's a network of Bath graduates who are willing to speak to your students about many different careers.
Graduate outcomes information
To help you market your courses and help students make career choices, we manage information on graduate outcomes for all courses. You can read more about this further down this page. This is separate from the public information on what do first degree Bath graduates do?
Careers resources
We encourage you to link to our information pages, guides and web pages from your website and Moodle pages rather than download them. We regularly update these resources, so linking to them makes sure your students have the latest version. You can access our guides and information from the Resources tab in our student site, MyFuture.
Ways you can help
Talk to us!
If there's information you need or something you'd like us to do for your students, we're always happy to help.
Encourage early career planning
Some students may need to make applications early in their final year for certain graduate roles, so preparation before this point will be very helpful.
Promote employability development
Encourage your students to think about how they can develop their employability during university so they have the best chance of success in their graduate job applications.
Collaboration to help students
Most students come to the University of Bath as a step towards their future career. Academic departments and Careers must work together to help students make the most of their time here. When students opt for placements, they gain several advantages. Our Careers Consultants already work closely with many placement staff, using their expertise to support students throughout the application process.
However, we also think it's important that first- and second-year students not taking placements are encouraged to use us. Most students know we exist, but only around half make use of us while they're here.
Experience has taught us that good exposure to students through their academic programme and departmental staff is the best way to get them to use us early enough to make a real difference. It often simply gets them thinking about their prospects and what they need to do before they graduate.
The bare minimum
At the very least, we'd like to talk to all undergraduate students near the start of their final year and Master's students early in their courses. A half-hour dedicated careers talk within the department is enough for us to raise awareness of the job market, the application processes they'll face and the support we provide. We also welcome referrals from your staff when they encounter students with employment concerns. The problem is that for many students, this could be too late, especially if gaining relevant work experience or making early autumn applications is essential for success.
The ideal
The careers message works best with regular, dedicated careers lectures at the start of each year. These should be tailored to particular groups of students and supported by further events throughout the year, such as:
- career-planning workshops or lectures covering advice on job-searching, CVs and applications, interviews and assessment centres.
- networking events or talks using departmental alumni.
- sessions for students going on their year abroad or on placement about applying and making the most of their experiences.
- talks and lectures on further study options or 'alternative' careers for students in vocational disciplines such as Pharmacy or Social Work.
- academic skills training to develop employability skills and how to transfer them from academia to employment. We can run these ourselves or help you to source employers to do this.
All these events are available by talking to your departmental Careers Consultant. See 'Bespoke activities' below for more information about what we can offer your department.
To make sure we have successful, well-attended events that benefit your department, your students, and our staff, we'd ask you to do the following:
Have a departmental contact for Careers
Allocate a member of staff to be in regular contact with Careers to plan events and talks. This works best when it's a member of academic staff, as this makes sure all students – not just those going on placement – are involved in careers-related activities.
Promote events in advance
Publicise events well in advance to students and avoid clashes with deadlines, other events and reading weeks. Where possible, build us into a programme of talks or events that students are obliged or required to attend.
Use student societies
Use departmental-related student societies to arrange or promote events and encourage their peers to attend.
Hold tailored careers events
Try to make the event a specific careers event rather than part of a longer 'general' lecture where our message is lost. Short, well-scheduled, tailored events for particular groups work best as the message can be made more relevant to them.
Employability
One of our aims is to help students develop their employability skills and gain appropriate work experience. Our regular contact with employers means we know what kind of skills and personal qualities graduate recruiters are looking for. Our position within the University makes us aware of the range of opportunities available to students, which can help them develop these skills and qualities. Also, our understanding of the graduate job market and current recruitment methods and career paths is invaluable to our students. We're happy to use these skills and knowledge to help you develop your programmes to address the issue of employability. Contact the Careers Consultant for your department to discuss improving your students’ employability.
Bespoke activities
We're always happy to work with you to develop resources or activities that would most benefit your students. Here are some examples of events we've developed with and for individual Departments in the past. Please contact your department’s named Careers Consultant to discuss how we can best help your students.
Careers talks
We regularly offer talks within Departments. These can be anything from a ten-minute introductory session in Induction Week to lunchtime talks giving more detailed information. Sessions can be tailored to suit each year group - for example, career planning for first years, placement preparation for second years and job-seeking strategies for work experience or graduate jobs. We can also tailor sessions for international and Master's students.
Departmental or faculty drop-in
The Careers Consultant for your department will offer weekly, in-faculty drop-in sessions to your students. Please contact them to find out when and where these are held.
Tailored resources
We produce resources that are tailored to Bath students and the courses they study. For example, the ‘Careers in…’ series includes 'careers in sport', 'careers in science', ‘Careers in psychology and mental health’ and many others. These guides have information on the skills developed in specific courses, possible career options, places to look for jobs and suggestions on how to maximise employability. We also have our Specialist Support guides aimed at particular student cohorts.
Networking and panel sessions
We regularly work with academics and placement teams to put on events where alumni can share their experiences and advice with current students. Please contact your department’s Careers Consultant to find out about existing activity, or to suggest a potential contact – we would love to hear from them!
Workshops
We can run bespoke sessions on, for example, CVs for placement students. In the session, students learn how to tailor their CVs for particular roles, as well as take part in a job shortlisting exercise for a specific post. This can significantly improve the quality of CVs and subsequent success rate in getting placements. We can run similar sessions for interviews, where students can experience what it is like to be interviewed as well as being the interviewer.
Graduate outcomes data
Careers supports the collection and analysis of graduate outcomes data from all students at a specified time after graduation. For further details see Graduate Outcomes information for staff.
Please contact Careers if you have any queries about graduate outcomes.
Services to your students
All students at the University of Bath are welcome to make full use of our services. Those who are currently on placement can contact us via email. Students and staff can get a good overview of our services and support from our website.
Researchers have their own area on our website.
Help for your students
Students can browse job opportunities and access career resources on our online hub, MyFuture. This is also where they can book themselves onto events and access online support. University staff can also access the site and browse resources.
Students’ projects: We regret we do not have the resources to assist students with projects related to graduate employment or careers, or other areas of our expertise.
Services to your graduates
We also provide services to Bath graduates (including postgraduate leavers):
- one-to-one support from Careers staff and access to information indefinitely
- access to our resources online
- graduate opportunity listings on MyFuture
Services to employers
We interact with employers regularly and have a comprehensive network of about 4,000 organisations of all sizes, all interested in Bath students. This is part of what makes us so effective at working with students to improve their employability – we hear directly from employers about what they want and how the students can best demonstrate it.
In essence, we act as a very big ‘shop window’ for the University – did you know that we:
- are visited by over 300 employers every year
- advertise opportunities with hundreds of employers at any one time
- advise employers on recruitment strategy
- arrange joint meetings with academic departments and employers, or refer employers on as appropriate
- regularly update employers about changes to programmes and new courses
However, we know that employers and alumni will often contact you with opportunities or offer to arrange sessions. This section aims to help you by setting out what we already do and reassuring you that we can help you by making sure your students get all the opportunities without information overload or event clashes.
Do you get requests from employers and agencies to advertise opportunities?
We run a comprehensive, free, online vacancy advertising service for employers. Details of all sorts of opportunities are advertised on MyFuture, where all students can view them.
If you send details to us via careers@bath.ac.uk, we will upload them for you. This means your students need only look in one place for great opportunities. Alternatively, please refer employers to our vacancy advertising policy with details on how to submit opportunities.
Do you get requests from employers and agencies to block email your students?
Please feel free to send the request to our Employer Engagement Team. We already offer a target email service to selected student groups on behalf of employers. This operates as a chargeable service. If you choose to offer this to some employers without charge, then you may be inundated! To avoid information overload, we make sure that the emails are brief, small capacity, relevant and only sent to limited year/subject groups. We also spread them out if there are several in any one week.
Do you get requests from employers to set up recruitment events for your students?
Hopefully, you already know about our centralised events, skills workshops and careers fairs. If an employer asks you if they can come on campus, whether just to speak to your students or to all, please get in touch. We can then do our best to make sure that no clashes of interest for the students arise from what we already have in place. Our Employer Engagement Team will be happy to book in an employer presentation or advise on the current diary.
Contact the Employer Engagement Team
Writing references
You should follow the guidance on obtaining and providing references (in respect to existing or former staff and students) which has been set by the University. Section five deals with providing references for current or former students.