Job done?

I made a decision last year that I would use my final year to purely concentrate on getting a good degree at university. I spent the first two years juggling uni work, part time jobs, internships and general life (as so many students do) but now I feel that my CV is sufficiently meaty enough to mean that I no longer need to bust a gut to add more personal selling points this year.

Perhaps naively though, I hadn’t really anticipated how much time, effort and energy this whole job hunting malarkey was going to suck out of me. From my own desktop research and that of fellow bloggers, it seems that there are very few PR graduate schemes out there, and the majority of these are on the brink of closing. (See Ben Cotton’s v useful post) So I have spent the last few weeks writing, re-writing and polishing my application forms, and believe me some of them are head scratchers!

I am glad I started researching my options at this fairly early stage, as it can be tempting to concentrate fully on dissertations and portfolios and leave the job hunting until afterwards, but by this point the majority of positions are likely to have gone to the keen beans. I expect though, that the majority of entry level PRs will be employed off the back of tailored speculative applications, as many PR consultancies are too small to have a specific graduate trainee scheme, or the budget to advertise for that matter. So researching agencies I would love to work for and making sure they know why I’m perfect for them will be my next mammoth task.

The job application process has also made me realise how important it is to keep a record of your duties and responsibilities on placements and to have an up to date CV, as trying to wrack my brains as to what I did on a 3 month placement 2 years ago would have proved rather difficult.

I will keep you updated as to whether the hours of effort have paid off!

In the mean time, I must get back to writing 400 words on why I’m the perfect candidate, and get my ideas together for my PR campaign to restore the reputation of the city of London...