Career planning during your studies
Career planning is about building a bridge from studies to working life. At its best, career planning is a sustainable process and attitude throughout the study cycle that will help you find your place in working life. It is important to consider your own skills, interests and goals from the beginning of your studies.
Competence and skills are accumulated during your studies in many ways
Working life skills are constantly evolving during studies - often even without noticing it. Working life is not detached from studies, but is involved in the themes of studies, for example, as an examination and structuring of social phenomena from different perspectives. Independent essays and dissertations expand knowledge to areas where one's own competence is deeper than that of other student colleagues. Competence is also accumulated through various forms of study, such as group work, tasks requiring independent information acquisition, seminar presentations or written reports.
The Learning Outcomes of the courses help to perceive and identify one's own learning. What is often learned is in fact even much deeper and more complex than the subject of a single course. In addition to the target phenomenon, we learn how to look at different factors, what their significance is as part of the whole, and how these observations can be extended to experience other similar phenomena.
Try, explore and discover!
In addition to your own-looking choices during your studies, you can also apply for and test your own in many ways. By following the themes of your choice from different sources, with hobbies, participating in volunteering or doing summer or part-time work, you can gain insight and experience from areas, tasks or customer groups that interest you.
It is worth thinking broadly about work related to one's own field of study: the opportunity to get to do so-called basic tasks in an interesting organization or field can later lead to expert work in the same employer or industry. Grassroots experience is often invaluable in developing the same activity later in an expert role. Competence can often be applied in very different tasks, and one's own wish for the future can be found in an industry or employer whose existence was not even known at the beginning of studies.
Take advantage of information about future opportunities
Many actors in the university community produce content that you can take advantage of as you expand your idea of your own future opportunities. From career events of your own subject organization and degree program, you can hear career stories and job descriptions from different fields. Visiting lecturers, teachers drawing on their own experiences and fellow students who have already worked will open up new perspectives on the events of the surrounding society.
Discussions about study content and working life situations open connections between theory and practice. Together with others, by reflecting on one’s own thinking, one’s own understanding of society and its various actors and activities - as well as one’s own routes and opportunities - expands and diversifies.
Where to find help and support for your career planning
The transition from studies to working life often feels like a big change. It is often easier to think about the future after graduation in small pieces from time to time at different stages of study.
- Reflections can be addressed to your own teacher tutor and, for example, personal study plan guidance offers places where your own plans can be considered and weighed against future goals.
- A personal career guidance discussion is a personal guidance discussion on career planning themes with a career counselor. These themes can include, for example, applying for an internship, approaching graduation, identifying one's own skills, finding employment and job opportunities.
- On JobTeaser UP Career Tips website, you will find content that you can use to support your career considerations and job search. You can find e.g. Examples of CVs, frequently asked questions in job interviews and tips for answering them, as well as tips for making a job application and video CV. At JobTeaser you will also find job advertisements and career events. You log in to JobTeaser with your own TUNI identification.