King's College London - Homepage

Laura Mackenzie
Head of Careers & Employability, King’s College London
The Careers and Employability Service aims to do three main things with students to help them to explore, connect and reflect. So, to explore the range of career options that are available to them, by putting them in touch with employers, arranging events where they can find out about the different things they might want to go on and do as a graduate. To connect with employers, so through some of our careers fairs, through our skills sessions that are co-delivered with employers and through helping students to find work experience and internships. And then, finally, to reflect, so helping students to really think about the various skills that they’ve gained at King’s, whether it’s through their course, through internships or work experience or activities like sports clubs and societies.

To help students access those resources and really understand how best to find out about the world of work, we have some careers information specialists who are responsible for doing a lot of research into the labour market and finding useful resources so we can really help students to understand what they need to do to research their career now and also in the future.

Adam Dimitroff
Internships Manager, King’s College London
We run something called the “Internships programme” which is made up of a series of what we call accredited internships modules. We also handle student support for anyone, basically, seeking an internship, so, we run a series of student support consultations really anything designed to help a student in their sourcing and placement of internships.

Timothy Bowyer
International Politics BA

I think an internship is vital nowadays because you can’t get away with a job if you haven’t had passed experience. We have an awful lot of holidays, for example during the summer, and if we don’t make the most of this time, how can we stand out from the crowd.

Laura Mackenzie
Head of Careers & Employability, King’s College London

Here at King’s wave found that graduate recruiters are still very keen to come onto campus and meet with students. We’ve certainly not had any trouble attracting recruiters onto campus and in fact all of our careers fairs have been oversubscribed this year.

Lucy Rothwell
Student Recruitment, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)

PwC have been working with King’s for quite a while now and one thing we always find is that the student s are very diverse  and they’re very talented and they’re always very interested in these kind of skills sessions.

Laura Mackenzie
Head of Careers & Employability, King’s College London
King’s professional skills programme is an integrated programme of sessions which aims to help students to reflect on and think about the skills that most employers say they are looking for. So we’ve developed the programme in conjunction with employers and employers come onto campus to co-deliver those sessions with us. We look at core employability themes for everything from communication and teamwork to analytical thinking and problem solving and also the practical elements of things like presentation skills and assessment centres.

Lucy Rothwell
Student Recruitment, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)

I think one thing that you can definitely do is really use your careers service there are so many things that they offer in the way of services and skills sessions that you can get involved in.

Laura Mackenzie
Head of Careers & Employability, King’s College London
We work in close partnership with the Students’ Union here at King’s and we’ve been supporting them in delivering their Leadership Award which is a really exciting development for us.

Holly Walsh
Vice President, Student Activities and Facilities
King’s College London Students’ Union (KCLSU)
It helps students recognise and articulate the skills they’ve gained from being heavily involved here at KCLSU. It really helps students recognise four different areas. There’s teamwork, communication, project management and commercial awareness. Once they’ve studied these four areas they then put a portfolio together to really articulate the way they’ve gained skills through their activities.

Laura Mackenzie
Head of Careers & Employability, King’s College London
What’s really exciting is that we can not only help students develop their skills whilst they’re at King’s for the purposes of the societies that they’re leading but we can also contribute to their developing employability.

Charlotte Pywell
European Studies with French BA
Having that extra skill set, having that extra proof of something that you’ve done really adds to the graduate employability market and it’s so competitive at the minute that having that extra piece of paper that proves the skills that you’ve got is really invaluable.

Laura Mackenzie
Head of Careers & Employability, King’s College London
We have very good graduate employment outcomes here at King’s and students at both undergraduate and postgraduate level move into a range of different career areas and are very successful in those. We also find that King’s is a target institution for many of the largest employers in the UK and worldwide. Many employers are actually wanting to come onto campus to meet students and again that’s across all sectors from healthcare to the creative industries.

Alex Kantor
BSc Computer Science (2010)   
Recruited to Tesco Leadership Programme
In my final year I actually applied for the Tesco Technology Leadership Programme. It’s training you to be a leader really. I’m actually responsible for about 6,000 IT systems and making sure it’s running smoothly. I got a lot of experience of leadership from the King’s societies that I’ve been involved in either through project management or through being on the student council.

For me King’s had the perfect balance between academic and social development at the same time. The amount of societies there were was incredible and I knew a) that it would be good fun to join them, but b) that I’d get a lot out of it as well. It was brilliant. It is a lot about teamwork, so you learn teamwork aspects. That also led me to then getting involved in a lot of different areas of King’s life. I joined the student ambassador scheme; I think I ended up with over 200 hours of presentation experience which was absolutely fantastic for being at university. So, these kinds of experiences I’ve taken forward into business life, I use them every day, so far it has been fantastic and in the future,  I could go anywhere really!