Starting out on your career

Are you a graduate trying to plan out the best career path for yourself? We’ve asked five careers consultants to give some tips on how to go about it.

A
A university degree is no guarantee of a job, and job hunting in itself requires a whole set of skills. If you find you are not getting past the first interview, ask yourself what is happening. Is it a failure to communicate or are there some skills you lack? Once you see patterns emerging it will help you decide whether the gaps you have identified can be filled relatively easily. If you cannot work out what the mismatch is, get back to the selection panel with more probing questions, and find out what you need to do to bring yourself up to the level of qualification that would make you more attractive to them: but be careful to make this sound like a genuine request rather than a challenge or complaint.

B
Do not be too dispirited if you are turned down for a job, but think about the reasons the employers give. They often say it is because others are ‘better qualified’, but they use the term loosely. Those who made the second interview might have been studying the same subject as you and be of similar ability level, but they had something which made them a closer match to the selector’s ideal. That could be experience gained through projects or vacation work, or it might be that they were better at communicating what they could offer. Do not take the comments at face value: think back to the interviews that generated them and make a list of where you think the shortfall in your performance lies. With this sort of analytical approach you will eventually get your foot in the door.

C
Deciding how long you should stay in your first job is a tough call. Stay too long and future employers may question your drive and ambition. Of course, it depends where you are aiming. There can be advantages in moving sideways rather than up, if you want to gain real depth of knowledge. If you are a graduate, spending five or six years in the same job is not too long provided that you take full advantage of the experience. However, do not use this as an excuse for apathy. Graduates sometimes fail to take ownership of their careers and take the initiative. It is up to you to make the most of what’s available within a company, and to monitor your progress in case you need to move on. This applies particularly if you are still not sure where your career path lies.

D
It is helpful to think through what kind of experience you need to get your dream job and it is not a problem to move around to a certain extent. But in the early stages of your career you need a definite strategy for reaching your goal, so think about that carefully before deciding to move on from your first job. You must cultivate patience to master any role. There is no guarantee that you will get adequate training, and research has shown that if you do not receive proper help in a new role, it can take 18 months to master it.

E
A prospective employer does not want to see that you have changed jobs every six months with no thread running between them. You need to be able to demonstrate the quality of your experience to a future employer, and too many moves too quickly can be a bad thing. In any company it takes three to six months for a new employee to get up to speed with the structure and the culture of the company. From the company’s perspective, they will not receive any return on the investment in your salary until you have been there for 18 months. This is when they begin to get most value from you – you are still fired up and enthusiastic. If you leave after six months it has not been a good investment – and may make other employers wary.

Why Do We Read Novels?

We asked a group of academics for their views on the appeal of fiction

A Cathy Smith

Is a work by a prize-winning novelist better than a trashy summer blockbuster? Undoubtedly, if you’re looking for a literary masterpiece. But it’s not ‘better’ if you’re simply looking for escapism. ‘Literary fiction’, unlike ‘genre fiction’ such as mystery or romance, is not about escaping from reality. Instead it provides a means to better understand the world. What makes a work deserve the title of literary fiction can be pinned down, to a certain extent, by critical analysis of the writer’s techniques. Yet a huge element of the appeal of literary fiction lies in something almost indefinable – the brilliant, original idea; the insight that, once written down, seems the only way to say something. Writers of fiction have to recruit or seduce us into their world – only then do we trust them to take us on a journey with them. The books we put down after only a few pages are those which have failed to make that connection with us.

B Matteo Bianco

A novel – whether for adults or children – takes you places, emotionally and imaginatively, which you would never otherwise have visited. However, I don’t think you should put yourself under any more pressure to finish ‘a classic’ than a kids’ comic. And if by ‘classics’ we mean Tolstoy, Proust, Hardy and so on, then my own reading is distinctly patchy. The author Martin Amis once said that the only way we have of evaluating the quality of a book is whether it retains a readership. I think that’s fair enough, though it’s imprecise. A work of fiction can always be fine-tuned in such a way that the final experience for the reader is enhanced, and this fact must say something about the theoretical (if not practical) possibility of stating that one book is better than another. And while I can’t prove that a single copy of a classic work of fiction is a greater gift to the world than a million trashy romances, I’m going to go ahead and say it’s so anyway.

C Gita Sarka

The author Albert Camus says that the appeal of narrative art lies in its power to organise life in such a way that we can reflect on it from a distance and experience it anew. Distinct from television or film, literature allows us significant control over our experience of what’s being presented to us. One book I would always tell anyone to read is The Life and Times of Michael K. – a literary prize winner but hated by some of my colleagues. It’s a classic for me because of what it says about living in difficult times; to a lot of people it’s just a bit boring and the main character doesn’t speak enough. Categories such as ‘literary masterpieces’ and even ‘literature’ do not exist independently of their assessors – assessors who are bound in an era and see value in part through the eyes of that era. Personally, I find it impossible to make claims that one work is better than another. I can say why it might be worthwhile to study it, but that’s all.

D George C. Schwarz

If, at a certain time in their life a person is interested in just one particular genre or author, that’s fine as long as they have the opportunity of reading a wide range of books throughout their lives. These opportunities can come through family members, teachers and friends who can create the reading landscape and encourage them to look wider and further. A famous writer once said that it’s easy to recognise the people who don’t read fiction, as their outlook on life is narrower and less imaginative, and they find it hard to put themselves in other people’s shoes. It’s a generalisation but with elements of truth. The power of fiction begins with fairy tales, nursery rhymes and picture books, which give children ways of looking at the world outside their own experience. Literature teachers often recommend reading ‘the classics’. But what classics, whose and which era? In a way it doesn’t matter – the key point is that one can’t escape from a need for shared references and reading experience.