As my first year of university comes to an end, I was reading the latest issue of .net magazine and came across the article written by Jack Osborne about what to do after leaving university in order to gain employment within the industry. Although I’ve not yet reached that stage yet, there is a few tips that anyone at any stage of education can implement now in order to increase chances.

Portfolio:

Jack states that the portfolio of any work should be in the right order and as good as it can be as that is where potential employers will look first. Students are often encouraged to leave out university work from their portfolio but often that is all students have, and goes back to the old adage that they can’t get a job due to lack of experience but no-one’s willing to offer that experience. In my portfolio, two thirds of it is university based as that is all I have at the moment but another useful tip which I will implement over the summer is to “fake it”. By creating websites for imaginary clients it will give me a chance to improve both my design and coding skills as well as boosting my portfolio.

About:

The About Me section of any website is important as it is the individual’s chance to sell themselves to potential clients and employers. It is important to talk yourself up and is the perfect opportunity to highlight any achievements and explain your strengths. The About section of this site isn’t great and I will take some of Jack’s advice on board and re-write that section over the next few weeks. I’ve never been comfortable talking about myself but is something I will have to improve on and re-write that section completely.

Social Networks:

The use of social networks can also boost a designer’s profile by becoming known by others within the industry and increase interest in their work. The latest trend appears to be Twitter, with a high number of designers being active on the site. Follow famous faces within the industry in order to gauge what they’re working on as well as people within your local area in order to connect with like-minded people within your industry who may be interested in collaboration or referring work. Sites should link to these profiles from order to highlight to visitors that you are on these sites and networks and this is something I have not done yet apart from the twitter widget on the homepage of this site, but will be incorporated into a new about page.

Conclusion:

Although the article was aimed at university graduates I think it contains a lot of tips that could be implemented by anybody currently in education, as a way of increasing their chances of gaining employment. Personally, I’ll be taking on board some of these tips such as re-writing my about page and providing links to my social network profiles to build up connections from those as well as increasing my portfolio through real-world examples as well as “faking it” to practice as well as experimenting with some new techniques.

I’m also quite lucky in that I have employment during my holidays from University which give me some experience of working in the real world as well as my univeresity education which should stand me in good stead.

Are there any other ideas I should be working on to increase employment chances, what did you do to gain your first job within the industry?

Photo: Yersinia from Flickr, used under Creative Commons

As can be seen in my sidebar, I have a twitter account and usually send several “tweets” each day. When I first started using Twitter I had much less followers and wasn’t following as many people as I am now, and I was happy with that as I was still working out what the service was and it’s uses. These days however, I’m following more people and having more conversations and it has proven useful in the past when asking questions and receiving advice both from people I follow and from others. However, I’ve noticed that some people I’ve had to stop following because of the sheer volume of their tweets has made all the other ones get lost in the crowd.

It’s not that I want to stop following these people, as they are useful people to follow but I find that I just can’t keep up with the sheer number of messages if I haven’t checked in a couple of hours. And if this is happening to me who is following around 30 people, how do others cope who follow a lot more than me? Is there a way to filter out and “seek” the tweets from people that you want insted of trawling through until you find them amongst the others? Is there a third party application such as Twhirl that could help with this?

I’m not complaining about Twitter as I do like the service but sometimes it can feel like information overkill if conversations are going on around me, and that can be off putting.

So how do others cope with a high volume of received tweets?

So after having been away on holiday for 10 days and not checking my email too regularly, (twice it was) I managed to accumulate over 100 blog posts to read in my reader, and also received 76 emails in that time. IT has always been an industry which requires constant reading and for employees to remain in touch with the latest developments, but I thought going on holiday would provide a break for people to get away from the stresses and strains of everyday life. I certainly never thought that I would be accessing work emails whilst away on holiday.

With participating in the blogging course has meant that I received an email each day from that, plus a large number could be deleted without opening but it was still a chore to come home and plough my way through that load. After a quick search on the net, it seems that a lot of us check our work emails when on holiday. Is this ultimately necessary or is there a better way of managing workloads whilst on holiday? I’m sure there are people with a lot more emails and pressures to manage whilst away, so how do they do it?

Also, more people are worried about work and think about it whilst on holiday, and appears to be a growing trend amongst UK workers.

There must be more to life than working surely?