Future career advice for a recent graduate

The graduate market is highly competitive. There are a lot of excellent students, with strong degrees, internship experience and lots of other strong points to their application competing for jobs. Regardless of what scheme it is, youre likely to be up against strong competition.

You sound like you've been quite selective during this cycle. I suppose thats not necessarily a bad thing if you really want to make sure you get a job you feel well suited to and interests you. However, for most people there comes a time when being selective isn't particularly an option, and securing a job becomes the main priority.

I have some experience with programming, but not enough to fully understand what grad jobs are directly advertised to a computer science graduate. But I would make two points. Firstly, a lot of jobs that may not stand out as a programming role or be advertised as such may actually contain a lot of programming. For example, I interned in risk for Nomura, and essentially spent every day programming. The job role doesnt necessarily sound like it would be programming every day, but thats what it was. Secondly, once you have a foot in the door, the company will want to place you where youre best suited. If you show passion and drive, and you put yourself out there to get involved with projects that do involve programming, its possible to move within a company.

My grad scheme isn't necessarily in the industry or role I initially expected to be going in to. I was hoping to go in to banking or accounting and work in risk management. I currently have an offer from an energy firm for a finance grad scheme and studying CIMA qualification. Not where I initially thought id be, but from a bit of LinkedIn snooping I see they have people working in market risk so my plan is to try and get that on one of my rotations, show my passion and ability and take it from there. Time is slightly more pressing for me because of my age but I would prefer to do that than reject the offer on the hope of getting something next year.

Personally I would say to identify the industry you would like to be in and apply for the grad schemes within that industry. If a company doesnt have a scheme that looks directly relatable to what you want, choose the next best thing they have. If you get an offer, then thats great, and if you then find something more relevant you can reject it. But at least you have a way in.

Id say you would be in a good position to apply for either graduate schemes or experienced hire after an 8 month project (although I'm not sure if 8 months experience is enough for employers). If your current position takes you up until August, if they decide not to keep you on, then thats an ideal time to throw yourself in to grad applications. Most of them open up around that time. Granted you wouldn't start until September 2018 for most of them. But that would give you a year to travel/do a masters/do whatever you like. On the other hand, you could apply for experience hire positions to begin as soon as you finished your current placement.

Personally I would go for a graduate scheme. I think the opportunity to move within a firm would be better, you'd be likely to get more training, probably gives you a better foundation to then go on to apply for experienced hire.

I did around 40 applications. Jobs which I was hugely over-qualified for (in my opinion) were rejecting me instantly. Im now down to one offer and a phone interview with one more company which I would probably prefer to what I already have. As I said, choose the industry, do as many applications as possible, then choose the next industry and repeat. Getting through to assessment centres where you can actually talk to people in the division about what you will be doing on a daily basis can be quite eye opening.