Work and professional experiences

Work experience can come in many forms; it does not need to be a formal internship or industry placement. Continue scrolling to find ideas and examples of a range of work experience.

Employers like to see work experience in graduate applicants. It helps you to build and prove skills that you can’t develop within your degree like working with customers, team working with people who are different from you and work readiness skills such as time management and professionalism.

Whatever the type of opportunity it can give you the following things

• Transferable skills and knowledge;
• An opportunity to discover if a job is for you;
• Contacts in your chosen industry;
• Experience that you can talk about on job applications and in interviews;
• Payment (Imperial College Careers Service only advertises paid positions, except in the case of charities and statutory bodies which are exempt from the National Minimum Wage Act).

No matter what your work experience is it will give you an opportunity to develop different skills and meet a range of different people. To make the most of this try:

• Creating a skills audit as you are doing the experience while it’s fresh in your mind. See our webpage on knowing your skills to help with this.
• Adding the people you work with or meet as connections on your LinkedIn profile. This way you’ll be able to get in touch with them again in the future if you need to. For more support on using LinkedIn visit our LinkedIn web pages. 

Having a CV is not the first step to getting work experience although many students think it is. CVs need to be tailored to what you’re applying to so writing one without any context is hard. Some experiences don’t need you to submit a CV. 

• What do you want to learn?
• Do you want to build skills?
• Learn more about an industry?
• Build your CV for research roles?

This can help you better define what experience you are targeting. You also need to consider the practicalities of each experience. What year of study are you in? Do you meet the criteria for the experiences on offer? What time of the year is it? When will you have time within your studies to do the experience? The Careers service webpages on career planning, timelines and career journeys can help you to understand this.

Once you know what you want you want to gain you can start to research. Usually, you’ll need to find the right websites that have advertisements. Exploring options has got starting points to help you. You can also explore our personas stories to discover how they found their experiences. 

Once you have found an experience you’d like to apply for, you can begin to create the correct application documents. Some organisations will want traditional documents like CVs, Cover letters or for you to complete an application form. Other roles will have bespoke processes for you to complete such as online tests or initial interviews. Some experiences will have multiple application stages, others will only have one. The key is to read all of the information you are provided with very carefully. The Careers webpages on applications and interviews can help you navigate the range of application processes.

Getting any sort of work experience is usually very competitive so you will probably want to apply for multiple experiences. There is no magic number you need to apply to get an offer but recruiters are always looking for quality tailored applications which take longer to complete. Once you do get offered a role, you will need to decide if you’d like to take it. Evaluating job offers can help you decide. If you find you are getting a lot of rejections, which isn’t uncommon, you may want to talk to someone at the careers service to get further support. You can book an appointment via jobslive.