Some careers are open to all: read up on them in the TARGETjobs magazine

Make your vacations an experience to remember

Don’t lose track of all those valuable skills you gain through vaction jobs, work experience placements or part-time work. Here are some practical tips to help you record the skills and experience you gain.

Vacations are hot not just because you can relax in the sun on a beach somewhere, but also because they are packed with good experiences you can use later on in your graduate job hunt. However, you need to make sure you remember what you’ve done and what skills you’ve developed.

Your vacations can be packed with experiences you can use in your graduate job hunt.

It sounds simple but it’s not uncommon for even the smartest graduate’s mind to go blank when pressed in an application or interview to recall examples of when they’ve successfully communicated an idea or demonstrated initiative in improving a situation or process. Most people can’t remember what they had for lunch last Tuesday, but there are tricks to help you remember the important things. And remembering examples from summer work experience past is important, so find a way to keep track as you go and never let those good examples slip your mind.

10 things to note

  1. The name and details of your employer, plus the date you start and finish working with them.
  2. Your job title and role: put down the key tasks and responsibilities you’re given to do. Keep adding to this list as you do more.
  3. The basic skills you use: telephone skills, computing/office software skills, task organisation and prioritisation, etc.
  4. Things you learn on the job: any job-specific training you receive and things you discover for yourself or learn from others.
  5. The aspects of the job you enjoy doing and why, and the parts of the job you find hard to do and why.
  6. Solutions you find to problems and how you resolve any difficult situations.
  7. Anything that’s quantifiable: if you’re organising an event, how many people is it for? If you exceed a weekly fundraising target, by what percentage did you exceed it? If you’re co-ordinating sports activities for a group of children, how many are in the group and what’s their age group?
  8. Examples from your work that show off core competences such as communication, teamwork, problem solving, analysis, commercial awareness, leadership, etc.
  9. Any feedback you receive.
  10. Details of managers happy to be contacted as a referee.

Ways to record your skills and work experience

Be practical and make it as easy as possible to record the skills and experience you gain in a format that you find useful. Here are some ideas to get you started:

  • Download our work experience tracker – use the questions and prompts to guide you.
  • If you’re skilled with office software, set up your own system in a spreadsheet or do something more fancy.
  • If you are a stationery fanatic, keep a notepad and pen with you to jot down things when they happen, or on the bus home.
  • If you are allowed to use e-mail where you work, send yourself messages recording key work experience achievements or things you learn. Use a consistent subject line and then you can easily group all your notes together or divert them to a separate folder in your inbox.
  • Did you get a talk about personal development planning when you started your degree course? Dig out the stuff they gave you and see if there is something useful you can adapt.
  • Feeling quirky? Send yourself postcards!

Top tip: Think like a STAR from the start. One of the tricks of responding well to application and interview questions is to present the Situation you faced or the Task you had to complete; the Actions you took; and the Results you achieved. Use this STAR method to help you structure and record your work experiences then they will be in a format that’s ready to pull out and use.

Reflect on the highlights

At the end of any activity or time of employment it’s always good to gather your thoughts and feelings. Think about what you liked and learned and whether the job suited your skills and personality.

If it’s an area of work you want to follow when you graduate, what extra skills and experience should you aim to get next to give yourself an advantage when you start looking for graduate jobs proper?

If it was a vacation job you did just for some summer cash or to get money to buy Christmas presents, get as much value out of it as you can by remembering what you did and finding good examples of skills that you can use on your graduate CV.

Where to look next

Tell us what you do...

Different people keep track of things in different ways. What are your top tips for setting up a failsafe method to keep track of all the experience you are gaining through part-time jobs, vacation work experience, internships, placements, etc? Sign in to comment and share with us what you do.

Print this article  | 

This article has been viewed 2671 times.
Rating: 4 / 5 (7 votes cast for this article)
Rate this article:

Related articles