As you know, the university has stopped face-to-face teaching for the rest of the semester due to the Coronavirus pandemic and, as university buildings are now also closed, student support services have switched to online support.

Your Careers, Employability & Enterprise Team will continue to support your career development, job search/applications and enterprise activities by providing a range of new and existing services remotely. We are also responding to the current situation by regularly posting useful articles on this blog about how to negotiate the current careers landscape and expanding our webinar programme and online resources. Please keep an eye on your LJMU inbox, Canvas and our social media channels for regular updates (@LJMUCareers). We understand that these are very challenging and uncertain times, but we are here to help, support and guide you as much as we can.

It will be a strange time for job searching and career planning for all of you, in particular final-year and postgraduate students. The uncertainty of the current situation may feel overwhelming, and you may be tempted to just sit and wait until it’s all over, but there are many positive actions you can take at this point to improve your employability and get into a state of readiness to give yourself a head start when recruitment activities go back to normal. For example, start networking online, get creative and create your own internship, use your social media to show what you’re working on or take an online course to brush up on a specific skill.

Here is a summary of some of the key services you can access remotely from our team:

Appointments with a Careers Adviser or Employability Adviser
If you would like to book a careers appointment with a Careers Adviser to explore your options, discuss particular career paths or explore what your subject area prepares you for, you can still do this.  In addition, if you would like an application form/CV/personal statement for postgraduate study etc reviewed, you can also book in with an Employability Adviser.

Should you wish to make an appointment, please visit our website for contact details or simply email us at careers@ljmu.ac.uk (Please note we are currently offering telephone / videoconferencing or online/e-mail appointments instead of face-to-face meetings).

Webinars
We run a regular programme of online employability seminars, covering key themes like finding employment opportunities for 2020 graduates, developing your LinkedIn profile,  CV writing and preparing for telephone and skype interviews and are currently developing new sessions to add to this. To book a place and access these very helpful webinars, click here: https://careers.ljmu.ac.uk/

Online Careers Guides and Mini Guides 
Now is also a good time to make use of the wide variety of useful resources you can access on our Careers website. Prepare and update key application documents with our ‘CV and covering letter’ guide, get networking online with our guide on ‘Maximising LinkedIn for your career’, or start researching your career options in your school-specific Career Planning Guide, which contains lots of alumni case studies to give you initial career ideas and peer-to-peer advice. You can also download a variety of fact sheets on teacher training or postgraduate study and research, as well as subject-specific career insights for your course. To search and download, click here.

Careers Zone 24/7
Our ‘Careers Zone 24/7’ website offers you an online job board and job tracker and a range of digital career tools, which provide you with a great starting point to improve your employability and compete in the graduate labour market. You can log into the platform and start exploring the huge range of content here.

The wide choice of e-learning courses, career assessments, employer videos and podcasts, industry reports and news ensure that you can access suitable resources for wherever you are in your career journey and decision-making, while the interactive tools (including CV builder and cover letter builder, CV-scoring tool CV360, interview simulator, psychometric tests) help you prepare for each stage of the placement and graduate recruitment process.

Centre for Entrepreneurship 
All enquiries to the Centre of Entrepreneurship should be directed to startup@ljmu.ac.uk – please include your phone number so a member of the team can call you back.

These are unprecedented times, so please take care of your physical and mental health, and follow updates from the university and all student support services via our social media channels and your university email. As your university Careers, Employability & Enterprise Team, we are here to support you as best we can, so please make use of any of the above services, and remember that there are many positive steps you can take right now to prepare for your future career.

The LJMU Careers, Employability and Enterprise Team