How To Develop Your Career Ideas | CareersLab

So you have the outline of some career ideas and you're not sure what to do next. Well, you're in exactly the right place. My name's Raj and I'm a careers consultant at UCL with over five years experience. In this video, I'm gonna share three sure fire ways for you to explore and develop any career idea you might have. So the first way I recommend exploring and developing your career ideas is through online sources. And I'm gonna recommend three of them. The first of these is iCould. It's a website platform that hosts many videos of people talking about their occupational areas. So say you're interested in marketing, for example. Well, on iCould, if you search under marketing, you can find over 50 videos of people talking about their various roles in marketing so that you can become aware of the breadth of roles. And by scrolling down, you can get sector information about salaries and lots more. It's a really good place to start. The second online source I'd recommend is the Prospects website. Simply search for Prospects plus the career sector you're potentially interested in, and you're gonna find a profile written by a professional. Now in this example, the profile for a patent attorney, it includes responsibilities in the role, what to expect, and skills so that you can also go ahead and figure out how you match up and also what skills you might need to develop in order to give yourself the best chance of entering that profession as well. Lastly, in terms of good online sources of information for careers is LinkedIn. Often you'll find that people describe their roles in some detail. So by looking for people's profiles that are active in the sectors you're interested in, you can get some really interesting insights. Okay, so tip number two for developing exposure to career sectors you might be interested in is to speak to people who are active in that profession right now. Now the first way you can do this is to engage with alumni networks. If you're at UCL, you're lucky, we have an amazing resource for you to use. Simply go to uclalumnicommunity.org, search on the career area you're interested in, and hit return. And the platform will return matching people's profiles. Now look out for those with willing to help under their profile to see exactly how they can help. And you can contact these individuals directly through this platform. Now I recommend this three-step approach when reaching out to people. So something along the lines of, hi, I'm really interested in the work you're doing as a patent attorney. There's a parallel with my own experience as I consider how intellectual property rights can secure investment in new technology. As part of my degree, might we be able to have a conversation about how I could get professional exposure to the work you do? Kind regards, send. Now the beauty of keeping it as wide open as I've just suggested, you can be privy to a wide range of options. It can be to chat over the phone, over Skype, to meet over coffee, but also developing a mentorship experience, maybe even getting some work experience and work shadowing in the bargain as well. It's worked for me so many times using this approach. It is very powerful if it's done well. Okay, so the other way I would look to speak to people active in the career areas you're potentially interested in is to attend talks that are being hosted either by organizations within that sector or by sector bodies. Here's one particular example if say you're interested in corporate banking. So simply by searching talks at J.P. Morgan, I was able to find this page which shows many talks and events where you can go and learn the language motivation of the organization, but also what's going on and what's on the mind of people active in the area. Now you can attend campus events with J.P. Morgan, I'm sure they're gonna attend your university, but there's something far more powerful about attending their premises. Generally, they're gonna put more resource into that event, but also you're more likely to speak to a wider range of professionals and get a better chance to have a more developed conversation with them. It's seriously amazing what can happen if you put yourself out there. Okay, so technique number three for developing exposure to career sectors you might be interested in is gaining work experience or an internship in that sector. Now in early January, there's gonna be a two-part careers lab guide on how to get an internship. There are lots of ways of securing one. Check out the vacancies page through My UCL Career and I'll put links below in the description box. And we also offer amazing paid global internships through UCL Careers as well. I'm also gonna recommend some other aggregating websites. Amongst those are Student Ladder, Prospects and Gradcracker. All three are linked below in the description box, but please know that you can write directly to people and organizations to ask for experience and I definitely recommend it. It's a speculative approach. Now, if you're not sure how to do this, you can definitely book in for a careers guidance appointment, or if you feel very strongly that I should produce a video on exactly how to do this, then leave a comment in the comment section down below and I'll see if I can make a video on this sooner. But lots of different ways of getting internships and experience to help you find out whether a particular career area is for you or not. Okay, so that's it for this video. I have no doubt that by following these three surefire ways, you'll get a far more developed and nuanced feel for a particular sector. Now, done well, this can help you develop professional contact and identify sub-branches of careers within those already existing in your interest that you might want to explore further. Taken together, all of these measures will give you the momentum to clearly express your motivation for entering a particular career sector to turn an idea into action. As always, if you have any careers questions, absolutely any careers questions at all, please email me or leave a comment in the comment section down below and don't forget to hit subscribe and hit the bell icon to activate notifications. We have new videos coming out weekly. Happy exploring.