How did we do?

If you would like to make a comment about the Careers Service, please contact us. We would love to hear from you about our appointments, events or any of our other services. Let us know if you received some great advice, feel supported, or what you would change to improve your experience. We want to hear the good news stories and about areas we can improve!

How we respond to your comments

We request feedback at various times of the year through a variety of surveys and informal channels. This provides us with invaluable feedback that enables us to appraise our service delivery and make changes to improve the services that we offer.

The information below represents an analysis of recent feedback taken through 2023-24 from students and alumni on our services and the actions we have taken as a result.

'A section of the career website dedicated to external undergraduate research opportunities would be useful.'

It'll be difficult to compile a finite list of opportunities due to the complex nature of how these operate across Imperial with each academic department doing something different. However, we'll explore this as a development area over the coming year.

'Some of the services like Shortlist.Me and GoinGlobal were not easy to figure out in the Careers website.'

We're working on improving our webpages for our exclusive online resources and reviewing our marketing avenues to help you find and engage with this great content.

‘The selection of employers advertising their vacancies on JobsLive could be wider/better. There are many companies I have never even heard of.’

We promote a variety of opportunities with big and small organisations, and we encourage students to look beyond the big names for suitable work. Approximately 70% of the UK workforce are employed within small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs), and the big companies, like those in the Times Top 100, account for around only 24,000 graduate vacancies each year. Exploring opportunities in both big and small organisations can widen perspectives and we will continue to promote a variety of roles.

‘The CVs, Cover Letters and Personal Statements Guide is a really helpful guide and I have used it to edit my CV and cover letters. You could give a few CV templates as well.’

It’s great to hear that our  CV, Cover Letter, and Personal Statements Guide is useful, however using a template is unlikely to make you stand out as your documents will start to look the same as every other job seeker. The more you tailor your documents to the opportunity and your own experiences, the more likely you’ll be to succeed. It’s for that reason that we will provide information, advice, and guidance but we will not provide templates.

‘Career Fairs are very useful but as they’re busy having a map easily accessible to show which stalls are where will help plan our time better.’

This is a great point. We have placed maps at the entrance of our career fairs, but we will also explore making these available online before the events too.

‘You should involve the international students in your workshops, including the time zones. The time zone is the main reason why I haven't attended many.’

We tried running some career events at different times (including early mornings and later evenings in the UK) to assist with access to our services outside of core teaching time. We will try to remain as flexible as possible within the constraints of UK workday but we must also be mindful of our work-life balance, especially where we have guest speakers, and it may not be possible to meet all time-zones for all events.

‘Could you collaborate with the department to carry out more lectures about what you can do with your degree?’

We’re trying to engage more academic departments to help embed careers information, advice and guidance into timetabled teaching. This includes support for professional skills development such as teamwork, presentation skills, and communication. Sometimes this collaboration is easy and at other times we the student voice to assist in gaining access to teaching time.

If you think there’s a specific need in your department, please contact us directly to explore this or speak to your student representatives.

‘You have a lot of events, but I don’t always hear about them.’

We’d encourage you to regularly check the events calendar on JobsLive, subscribe to our weekly newsletter, follow our social media channels (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X), and look out for specific marketing emails for more information on events, opportunities and how to get involved in competitions. We’re also working with the team behind the My Imperial Campus App to integrate elements of our work into the new app which we hope will assist with highlighting relevant events and news.