How confident are you feeling?

Part 1 — What the questionnaire told us, and what you could do to help

It was great to see you all completing the confidence questionnaire in October, and telling us how you feel. Thank you for taking the time to give us an honest picture.

“We noticed that a number of you were not feeling confident”

When we looked at the results, we noticed that a number of you were not feeling confident about aspects of planning for the future and so we wanted to get back in touch and offer our support. We have focused on the areas where overall confidence levels were lower and have suggested a few things that we hope will help.

“5 things that we feel could help”

1. Knowing what your options are?

The results told us that 38% of you did not feel confident you knew where to find out about your options or opportunities. Hearing messages like — “you can do anything with a psychology degree” may be well intentioned, but may not have helped if you are looking to narrow down options.

To get a more manageable insight into your options why not try “What can I do with my Psychology Degree?” or our webpages “Careers Options with Psychology?” These are designed to give you a flavour of popular choices, and experiences of psychology students like yourself. In particular our list of jobs popular with psychology graduates is a good place for ideas for job titles to explore further. If you have an interest in any of the psychological therapy specialisms but are not sure how to get there, these pages also have some great videos and information sources about what is needed.

We also recommend using LinkedIn to explore where psychology graduates from The University of Manchester have gone on to work after study. If you use the University’s LinkedIn page, you can pull up everyone who has a psychology degree on the second page of bar chart filters and then use the search fields to narrow things down.

If you prefer to talk things through in person, please do book in for a conversation with myself or my colleagues Suzanne or Sarah, who are your psychology careers team.

2. Knowing who to talk to?

“A conversation can make all the difference”

So many of the graduates we have worked with over the years have told us that a conversation with someone working in their future career area made all the difference. Whether you meet them at an alumni event, connect with them on LinkedIn or encounter them by chance through another route does not matter. However, in the survey, only 49% of you felt confident that you could talk to someone in the areas you were interested in.

At The University we have The Manchester Network which helps you to connect up with over 3000 Manchester alumni online. You can email them, ask questions and sometimes set up work experience opportunities. We hope there is someone for everyone on there. At the moment, the network is temporarily suspended but we find that LinkedIn is also a great tool for doing this too.

If you want to hear from psychology graduates from Manchester, the next alumni events just for Psychology students, where we bring back Psychology graduates to talk to you, will be in mid-February and March. Look out for your weekly emails from Doron Cohen for more details.

3. Making decisions about the future?

“Decision making as more of a journey”

If only there was a simple online tool that could make sense of all your thoughts, skills and motivations and could suggest an ideal job for you? Whilst there is no exact algorithm that can account for your unique experiences and motivations, there are some online tools that can go some way to help. Our favourite is: Prospect Planner and we would also recommend using the Which Career? section of our website.

Around 35% of you did not feel confident about making decisions for your future at this stage, but we wanted to reassure you that this is very common and many of our graduates have experienced their decision making as more of a journey over time than a quick fix.

4. Marketing yourself effectively?

“This was where you felt the least confident”

This was the thing that, as a group, you felt the least sure about with only 22% of you feeling confident that you could market yourself effectively to future employers. This was a genuine surprise for us to see, as this is probably the area with the most help readily available. We hope that your CV assignment will have given you some feedback to start to take things forward, but please do use your Psychology careers team at any time if you are unsure about any aspects of applying for or securing a job.

This is our favourite starting point online for some of the best help out there: www.careers.manchester.ac.uk/applicationsinterviews/ We are also really pleased to launch an automatic CV checking tool for Manchester students, called the CareerSet CV Checker, for you to use to give you instant feedback on a few fundamentals of CV writing. It doesn’t tell you everything, but it’s already a very popular first step with our students, it’s completely free and it’s instant.

5. Getting in touch

“Whatever works best for you”

We look forward to working with those of you who will be taking the Confidence or Assessment Centre modules in the coming months. Feel free to ask us any of your questions.

The Careers team are also available to offer you advice, support or answer your questions outside of these modules. We have workshops and careers appointments online via Zoom or if you have a quick question just drop an email to Bmhcareers@manchester.ac.uk and one of the team will pick it up asap. We hope that these will give you space to ask about anything that is concerning you.