July 26, 2022, by NUBS Postgraduate Careers

Career Transitions: An important week in the MBA calendar

Moving on

Each year the Postgraduate Careers Team run MBA Career Transitions Week. The overall aim is to support students in making their next career move post-MBA. The week is just one element of the Nottingham MBA Personal and Professional Development Programme. Here, Full Time MBA students Tsitsi Griffiths 2021/2022 shares her experience of this important week in the MBA calendar.

Why is a week like this so important?

The Career Transitions Week was an insightful and helpful week that took place at the end of Semester 2. We had finished formal lectures and were fully focused on the last few remaining pieces of coursework and the summer management project. The week also coincided with the time that many of us were starting to think about post-MBA jobs. The week equipped us with guidance and knowledge of how to navigate the job market. This is especially true for international students who have little to no experience of working in the UK and have little idea about how the job market works in Britain. The sessions organised for the week were all relevant and helped inform us on practical skills such as job applications, optimising our LinkedIn profiles, how to negotiate salaries, and realising our untapped strengths.

What were your main takeaways?

My main takeaways of the week were the different strategies given to us by the panel of experts. This ranged from using industry specific recruitment agencies to being able to network effectively on LinkedIn. Sometimes when you consider these various strategies on your own, it’s easy to talk yourself out of using them and use conventional job searching methods. It was reassuring to have experts emphasise that there is no one size fits all method to finding a job and that there are various tools that can be used during the job search season.

Have the sessions helped you in moving forward?

Yes. The running thread between all the sessions of the week was self-reflection and being well informed. The unrealised strength session was insightful. It required us to be honest with ourselves whilst filling out the Capp Strengths Profile questionnaire. This then led to us finding out what strengths we use on regular basis and what strengths are untapped that can further enhance our professional lives. The NLP session, focusing on personal impact, with Mark Eldridge also used a similar tactic. We had to reflect on past experiences to discover our different representational systems and how those influence our learning styles and behaviours. Both these sessions required a great deal of self-awareness which is an important skill we all need in business and our personal lives.

Another common theme across the Career Transitions Week was the idea of being well informed. This is useful in situations such as salary negotiations as presented by Neil Courtis, who developed the PayNegotiation platform that we have access to at the Business School. The case study Neil used during the session was highly enjoyable and relevant as most of us will invariably find ourselves in a situation where we must negotiate our salaries. We were provided with a toolkit that will empower us in such situations.

In summary:

It was an enjoyable week that wasn’t just theoretical but also practical. It tied in everything we’d done so far that related to our career development and equipped us with the tools we need to be confident about our job search and beyond.

I highly recommend!

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