Why all work experience is good experience if you want a top graduate job.

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As a final year mechanical engineering student (4th year), I have to disagree with the importance of part time jobs when it comes to a career in engineering.
I have had a part time job in a supermarket for the first 3 years of my degree, including taking up the job to full time hours in the summers of 1st and 2nd year.
I have attended engineering interviews with big companies. 2 interviews for when I was applying for engineering internships (got one of them in the end), and 3 interviews so far for engineering graduate schemes. The interviewer would usually go with you through your CV asking questions about different parts of your CV in order (from top to bottom), and they always skip anything that is not engineering related.
So the nearly 3 years of part time work I have done never got a mention in any of my interviews.
I also fluently speak two other languages aside from English. That's never got a mention neither.
So my point being that, it might be different for other courses/careers, but for engineering, I would advice to focus on the technical kinds of work experience/jobs/societies/hobbies. These are all what engineering employers will be interested in.

As a final year mechanical engineering student (4th year), I have to disagree with the importance of part time jobs when it comes to a career in engineering.
I have had a part time job in a supermarket for the first 3 years of my degree, including taking up the job to full time hours in the summers of 1st and 2nd year.
I have attended engineering interviews with big companies. 2 interviews for when I was applying for engineering internships (got one of them in the end), and 3 interviews so far for engineering graduate schemes. The interviewer would usually go with you through your CV asking questions about different parts of your CV in order (from top to bottom), and they always skip anything that is not engineering related.
So the nearly 3 years of part time work I have done never got a mention in any of my interviews.
I also fluently speak two other languages aside from English. That's never got a mention neither.
So my point being that, it might be different for other courses/careers, but for engineering, I would advice to focus on the technical kinds of work experience/jobs/societies/hobbies. These are all what engineering employers will be interested in.

You keep ninjaring me.

It;s also pretty common knowledge about how hard it is rearing a baby, I have no first hand experience but I am not an idiot. My whole argument is about how hard it is and these parents had it a bit easier because they got outside help. I'm
not disputing how hard it is :-/

But if you are in a society that provides crap support for parenthood (which is like all of them) you are on your own and it is down to where you on on a socio-economic ladder. Some have it easier than others. Even for someone like me and my family the concept of hiring outside help to help look after a newborn baby is alien. What about the working class worker on min wage (is only earner) who has to work ovetime and already terrible shift patterns and is given 2 weeks paternity leave?

As you know, work experience is becoming so important in being an attractive candidate in a variety of careers. This is creating the need for students to get work as they are going through university as the job market (especially top jobs) is very competitive.

I also agree in that in my experience, things outside of the realm of engineering does not get discussed too much except for during HR interviews (and a lot of companies have a fairly minimal type of HR interview or one that's conducted at the same time as the technical interview), but again that does not mean the voluntary and extra curricular work I did was useless - although I do think that people who undertake such activities merely to tick a box may find they don't help them as much as they were led to believe, unless they can really sell the experience.

By all means. It has definitely helped me if for nothing but the interview experience I got when I was originally looking for a part time job. Being a cashier also helped gain confidence in facing customers...etc
The point I was trying to make is that part time jobs didn't have a direct impact when it came to applying to my career of choice (engineering) as other engineering related experiences and projects had.
So it did help me because I gained experience in how to apply to jobs and how to answer competency questions (tell me about a time when...), but was not in my experience an area in my CV that I was asked about during any of my interviews.
I understand however how it might make more of an impact in other careers where human interaction as such has as much of a weighing as technical knowledge. In my experience for engineering jobs though, the emphasis has always been on my technical skills.





As highlighted above, I do have an engineering summer internship with a big name in the top 100 employers. My panel interview for that internship included 2 engineers and one HR. But even the questions from HR were about my projects and modules at university. There was no mention of my part time jobs or any other non engineering experiences I had.
Similarly for the assessment centers I have attended this year for graduate schemes, they all had group activities / technical interview / personal interview. Most of my personal interviews were around 1 hour long (similar to the technical), yet all the questions were revolving around my technical internship, technical projects and engineering modules. There was no mention of my part time job, languages or any other of my non engineering experiences.
Also, part time jobs do take a good dozen of hours a week. So what I was suggesting is that engineering students might want to use these to either further improve their university projects, or work on an engineering project outside their course (as part of a national competition), as this will get them much more appreciation in engineering interview (even the HR questions) than a supermarket part time job.

Don't men get the same leave as a woman if they are single parent?

He wasn't single. But men in his position are in no position to have more time with the kids. Especially when you have to work overtime.

Sorry, I mean most of the time we align in our political outlook but I think what you're saying here is kind of irrelevant tbh.

Yeah why would men want to be able to actually spend time with the newborn child.

Yes, I get that. That completely changes the topic from whether people should be allowed to hire au pairs, to male employment rights and the huge gap between men and women on that front.

We went off topic ages ago and I never said au pair should be made illegal.

I didn't say you did say it was illegal (god this is gonna go on for ages)

It's just I don't like the whole line of argument which goes "If you say this about this it means this about separate issue". It doesn't.

I'm not saying you were wrong to au pair either. Or that you didn't get anything out of it. Or that the parents were horrible.

You asked me whether or not single male parents got same support as female ones. So I explained he wasn't single but was the sole provider for a soon to be child on min wage job with the bare min of paternity. We were talking about class and looking after babies so it seemed relevant to me.

Brian says hi.

You could argue that having a baby is a choice in his case.