The Graduate Career Handbook: Making the Right Start for a Bright Future Book

Shirley Jenner's The Graduate Career Handbook is a must for those undergrads whose drink-addled brains have cleared long enough for them to tot up how much they owe in student loans and to face the sobering thought that, post finals and Glastonbury, they need to secure gainful employment, if only to stave off the debt-collector. Jenner splits her book into three sections. The first section looks at choosing work which best suits your character, with useful advice on how to carry out a personal skills and knowledge audit and a very interesting chapter on different personality types. In the second, Jenner presents an informative overview of the 21st-century job market, before going on to discuss how you find a firm whose ethos and work practice match your own ideals. The third section is practical, chock-full of tips on writing "a brilliant CV", "how to succeed at interviews" and "how to succeed at selection tests", complete with worked, then test-yourself, examples. One of Jenner's strengths is that, as a visiting lecturer in Human Resources at UMIST, she knows her audience well. She makes frequent reference to the fact that she realises her readers are probably third years, struggling to complete assessed course work, with scant time to compose CVs, but stresses that as little as an hour a week spent job hunting can make all the difference between a hurriedly-accepted job on the milkround, which soon goes sour, and an altogether sweeter experience with the right employer. --Amanda CameronRead More