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Chasing a STEM career – Making yourself visible

By 14/05/2019February 24th, 2020STEM Careers, STEM News
This week is National Careers Week. Here at Peterborough STEM Festival, we pride ourselves on encouraging the next generation to develop a love of the four STEM subjects in the hope that they will pursue one of many possible STEM career paths.

Whether you leave school at your first opportunity or you spend years at university, there are a couple of things that you can do to get make yourself known to the right people.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a great way of getting yourself seen. Think of it as a social network for professionals.
Make sure your profile is complete with as much useful information as you can provide but also that it reads easily. Recruiters will look through lots of profiles so it helps to give them the information they’re looking for quickly and concisely.
Make sure that your ‘let recruiters know you are open’ button is toggled to ‘on’ and that you are contactable with a sensible email address.
Once your profile is ready, start making connections. Search for businesses you know of in the field you are interested in, interact with them and add people to your network. Search relevant hashtags and join groups.

Volunteer

Many employers won’t take you on until you have experience – but sadly it’s impossible to gain that experience if nobody will be the first to give you that break.
One way to combat that is to volunteer at any opportunity you get.
Here at Peterborough STEM Festival, we are completely reliant on people giving up their free time to make both our main day and our smaller fringe events a success. You could be just the person we need!
Little things like this will look great on your CV before you have work experience to list and show your dedication.

We’ll soon be opening our volunteer registration form so do make sure you pop back here soon if you’d like to be part of the 2019 team.

The team of volunteers and sponsors that made Peterborough STEM Festival 2018 a huge success

Network

Not just online, get out an about and meet the people you want to work with or for. Find local meet up groups and go along – the volunteers organising Peterborough STEM Festival also run a meetup: Digital People in Peterborough. Get yourself to conferences and talks. Not all of these cost money and can be hugely beneficial.
When volunteering, make sure you are speaking to the right people and let them get to know you.

Be yourself

Nobody ever made history by playing by the rules.
The thing with STEM careers is that there is always something undiscovered. There are always going to be better solutions, newer, bigger, better theories. Have ideas, test them and if you know you’re on to something keep at it.

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

Thomas Edison

Good luck!