Centre for Bioscience, The Higher Education Academy

In this section:

Employability

Bioscience ImageBank  

Employability

Are your students aware at an early stage of the graduate employment opportunities open to them?

At the start of their degree course some students have a clear idea of their employment aspirations but many have no idea at all. The choice of specific modules in second or third year may influence a student's chances of gaining a particular employment. So may their selection of work experience. Therefore, the full diversity of employment opportunities available should be made known to students EARLY in their course so they can make appropriate decisions. Information and guidance is available from

 

Campus Career Service

Careers advisers are aware of the whole range of employment opportunities available to graduates of particular disciplines, both subject related and generalist, as well as market trends and developments. They are usually willing to give talks to student groups in departments and follow this with tailored advice to individual students. Through their links with employers they can often find speakers who will describe work and career progression in their own professional area.

 

Industrial Visits and Research Talks

Industrial visitors giving research talks may also be willing to give a separate presentation (often available from their Human Resources unit) on employment opportunities available within their organisation and/or their own career path. Some employers will do this as part of their promotional activities through presentations arranged with the campus careers service.

 

Talks by Ex-Graduates

Talks to current students by recent graduates can help students to choose future career directions – it is important to have the breadth of possibilities represented. It is less helpful if students are exposed only to graduates who have remained in the discipline and at the laboratory bench or its equivalent. Your careers service may have a programme of employer-led seminars and/or careers fairs with invited alumni covering a wide range of opportunities. It is useful to have information about such events announced to students in lectures or on notice boards and students should be directed towards the Careers Service from very early in their university experience.

 

Field Visits/Industrial Visits

The use of field visits (e.g. in agricultural and environmental science) and visits to manufacturing companies or research laboratories (e.g. biochemistry/pharmacology/food science) can provide excellent opportunities for students to learn about actual day-to-day job content and also about the variety of employment opportunities available. Students may need encouragement and help to exploit visits in this way. A number of units are developing the use of academic projects in the context of real work situations and simulations or case studies which deliver academic learning outcomes based on real world scenarios.

 

Industrial Year/Work Placements

An industrial year or summer vacation in employment or a final year project partly spent in a company can be helpful as the full range of employment possibilities becomes clear. For example, many students assume that working in large pharmaceutical companies must involve bench-type laboratory work when in fact there are dozens of different posts involving many different types of work. The National Council for Work Experience is a useful source of information on this aspect of employability. See also Are your students encouraged to obtain work experience?

See also SEED (Science Education Enhancement and Development) A Guide to Developing Employer Links in Higher Education. The principal aim of this project was to promote enhanced employer links through a handbook of good practice including a series of case studies drawn from the sciences.

Looking at the career paths of professional scientists can demonstrate to students how their degree can lead to a career in the sciences. For example, The Royal Society student pages have a 'Meet the Scientist' section.

HMS Beagle (an online magazine produced by Elsevier) had a number of interviews with established scientists about their career path and also a number of articles looking at different careers with science. Download the interviews with scientists or careers articles (both pdf format).

 

Learned Societies and other organisations

Several learned societies provide information about opportunities in their disciplines:

Paragraphs describing the career progression of individual students with particular discipline related degrees can be found on the Prospects.ac.uk website under the 'Use your subject' section. Other useful sections on the same site are 'Your degree...what next?' which gives information on the value of a degree and the opportunities it may open and 'What do graduates do?' useful data on the employment destinations of graduates of different disciplines.

Students need to be aware of the employment destinations of their predecessors. For example, LMI4HE (a website managed by the Learning and Teaching Support Unit at the University of Manchester) contains some useful publications relating to employability in the North West of England.

Postgraduate careers

A number of sites and sources of information are available for postgraduate students when thinking about their future career.

  • What do PhD's do? A survey of the destinations of UK PhD graduates could give ideas about where to go next.
  • EMPRESS (Employers' Perceptions of Recruiting Research Staff and Students), from the University of Leeds, focuses on employers perceptions of recruiting people from a research background, including postgraduate students.
  • PhD jobs has careers advice, profiles of some large employers who regularly take on postgraduates, and a job search.
  • Research is cool has academic social networking opportunities specifically designed for exchanging research ideas and other relevant information, and those interested in research can use the site to find research jobs and postgraduate courses.
  • Jobs.ac.uk lists academic, research and support posts in colleges and universities across the UK.

 

Further links for Bioscience Graduate opportunities

The Bioscience YES (Young Entrepreneurs Scheme) - Yorkshire and Humber is an innovative competition developed to raise awareness of the commercialisation of bioscience ideas among postgraduate students/postdoctoral scientists working at Universities in the Yorkshire and Humberside region.

Scientists for Global Responsibility (SGR) has produced several documents that may be of interest to undergraduates when considering their future career options, including:

These and other documents are available in printed format (free to students) and electronically as downloadable pdf files from the Scientists for Global Responsibility website.

Back to Employability Homepage