The Student Room Group

How/where to find a job?

I finished uni about 9 months ago, with an economics degree and since then I've been applying to some of the jobs I really want to do, and after some stupidly long and slow processes they were unsuccessful (these were very competitive, and I wasn't really ready for it) now in the mean time I have been looking for some alternative short to medium term jobs with pretty much no success.
I have applied to loads, but nothing seems to work out, I even got rejected by Sainsbury's. Part of the problem is I don't really want to do the jobs I'm applying for, all I can find are sales or recruitment roles, which brings me to my first question: where can I find roles that are not in sales? I'm loooking on Reed, Indeed, Totaljobs, etc but there doesn't seem to be much choice. Is there somewhere else to look?
(I applied for a sales role and was unsuccessful, and the company directly offered me a conference producer role in the firm but was later unsuccessful with the next stage for that)

My next question is really how do I come across better in [phone] interviews? I've read some articles/thread/stickies and tried to incorporate those tips but that is by far my weakest point. Companies always seem very impressed with my initial application, then it just flops off from there.


I forgot to add, I am now thinking about doing a masters degree in computer science this year, as there seem to be loads of computer based jobs, and I would enjoy that more, but I am not certain about the value of doing it.
(edited 10 years ago)
I'm in a similar position as you, graduated with a 2:2 in Economics last summer.

I'm starting to think that an Economics degree is only good if you do very well and get loads of experience with summer internships etc, and unfortunately I did neither of them. And even if you do have some summer internship experience and a 2:1, it's still going to be hard to get these competitive jobs. There really aren't that many jobs where it is best to be an Economics graduate, a lot of them seem to better suit Computer Science or Maths graduates.

So many jobs are sales/marketing, I can't help but feel that I would perhaps have been better off doing Business Studies or Marketing or another one of these degrees that people tend to (probably incorrectly) view as being mickey mouse degrees. So, I find myself applying for admin roles, things like 'Office Assistant', but to be honest most of these I could have applied for without a degree and I'm only able to apply for them due to blagging about doing some admin work for my Dad who is self-employed

I've recently got some (voluntary) customer service experience, so now I can more credibly apply for a lot of jobs in the retail sector. The trouble is, why would they employ me? They see my CV and see straight A's at GCSE, good A-Levels and a degree in Economics. They're going to think that I'm 'too good' to work in retail, when the reality is I am happy to do almost any job at this stage.

'Too good' for menial jobs I am prepared to do, not good enough for the more skilled jobs. Well and truly ****ed.
Reply 2
I also got a 2:2, mostly because i didn't really enjoy the course and I was focussing more on the clubs I was in, especially in the final year (I think I gained more from this than the degree). Ironically I came down to a choice between computer science and economics when I was originally applying, I went with economics as I thought it would be a better all rounder, it seems computer science would have been the better choice.
What's really annoying me with these applications is that they all take so long.

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