University

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