My name is Matthew, and I am a current fourth-year PhD student at the University in the Department of Life Sciences. I wanted to share how my part-time job helped me with developing my transferable skills and discovering my next steps.
Balancing PhD studies and work
The nature of a PhD makes it difficult to find the right part-time role that can work around my experiments, long days, and busy periods. It meant that I needed a role that would ideally be a casual position with no set shifts each week, that allowed me to choose my own working hours, and would ideally be remote (I know, right? Not asking for much). For a little while whilst searching, I thought I was being a little ambitious and should maybe dial back, until I saw a role with the Careers team uploaded to the university's job portal.
I have now worked with the Careers team for just over three and a half years as a Vacancy Processing Administrator. The main responsibilities of the role involve processing student and graduate vacancies for the University Careers page. This can include graduate schemes, summer internships, employer open days, sandwich year placement roles, and more. In addition to being a part-time role, the position allowed me to gain consistent exposure to a wide range of roles across different sectors. This experience helped me develop a strong understanding of the graduate job market and what employers typically look for in applicants, from required skills and qualifications to broader employability attributes.
Building transferable skills
Alongside processing these vacancies, the role also involved a variety of additional responsibilities, including video editing, database building, and elements of web design. These tasks allowed me to develop a broad and transferable skill set that would be valuable in many different professional settings. Having the opportunity to work across such varied activities also helped me build confidence in learning new tools and adapting quickly to different types of work. In addition, working fully remote from a team brings its own challenges, but helps to strengthen skills of independence, communication and taught me how to collaborate effectively while still feeling connected and supported as part of a wider team.
Exploring possibilities
Perhaps most unexpectedly, the role played a key part in helping me identify the career path I am now planning to pursue after completing my doctorate. While completing a PhD, some of the questions you get asked most are ‘what are you going to do next?’, ‘are you going to become a professor?’, or ‘what is it that you do again?’. That last one is hard to get around… but the others are something I would constantly be thinking about. But working in this role exposed me to a wide range of opportunities, which helped me recognise where my interests and strengths aligned, something I may not have discovered as clearly without this experience. After seeing several roles come up in a certain sector, I was able to discover an industry I would have never considered without this role. Looking back, the role has been far more than just a part-time job during my PhD, providing clarity, transferable skills, and a genuine sense of direction for what comes next.
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