Graduate employment: Roles in small to medium companies

Not all organisations recruit in high enough numbers or on a predictable enough timescale to warrant having a graduate scheme. Many SMEs (small and medium sized enterprises) and start-ups recruit on an ad hoc basis through direct entry hires – they advertise roles at any time of year when they have a vacancy to fill.  To explore SMEs related to your degree, visit the what can I do with my degree page relevant to your department.

Rumi: Frontline Genomics

Rumi has experience as a freelance writer and also writes for Felix. She has decided to explore how these things might fit with her employment options. She uses Plan: Me to plan out how she might achieve stuff. You can see her Plan: Me, on Padlet to get ideas about how she did it.

You can see here how she reflects on her values and decides to look for smaller companies and some of the job sites she uses.

These places are particularly helpful for finding SME employers

  1. What can I do with my degree? Rumi looked at the postgraduate medicine webpage and started to use the links provided in the industry tab to find smaller companies.
  2. A company search on LinkedIn helped Rumi to explore the industry of both science journalism and her key science interest of genetics.
  3. Using ChatGPT Rumi gathered a list of genetic related journals and then used LinkedIn to find alumni who worked at publications she was particularly interested in.
  4. Rumi then combined what she learnt from all of these searches and used LinkedIn to begin connecting with alumni who worked at the organisations she was interested in.
  5. She submitted some speculative applications to science related journals which she received responses to say they had no jobs at the moment but would keep her details on file.
  6. Through one of the new contacts she made, she was sent a job advertisement at FrontLine Genomics as a science communication officer. She applied, went through the interview process and was offered the role.