ICI Career Services

Once you’ve completed your career training with ICI, the Institute will give you access to a wide range of FREE career services. This is part of our commitment to helping you launch, change or advance your career. Whether you’re looking for employment or want to start up your own business, our career services will help you to take your professional development to the next level.

ICI Career Services include:

Giving you a competitive edge

So, you’ve completed your training and now you want to put your new knowledge and skills to the best possible use by securing your dream job. But with so many roles available, and many different candidates competing for these positions, getting the job you want can be a daunting prospect. This is where we come in. ICI’s career services are designed to guide you through this process, helping you to identify the most suitable roles and giving you the competitive edge you need to secure them. Put simply, we’re here to help you shine.

Below is a more detailed breakdown of the services we offer.

Resume Preparation

A CV is often the first (and possibly only) chance you have to stand out to a potential employer. Organisations often have tens or even hundreds of these documents to sort through for each individual vacancy, so there is a lot riding on your resume.

As part of our support package, we offer a personal consultation with a professional resume writer to give you the CV writing help you need to stand out. They will guide you through best practice when it comes to these documents, offering tailored CV writing tips that make it easier for you to get noticed by the right people.

Whether you have never written a resume before and are starting from scratch, or you already have one of these documents but want to enhance and update it, this consultation will provide you with the specialist assistance you need. As well as helping you to create the strongest possible CV now, the advice you receive will be useful when you come to refresh your resume in the future.

A strong CV highlights your value, catches employers’ attention and, crucially, helps you to land interviews.

Job Searches

In the past, job searches were often as simple as reading the ads in local or national newspapers. Not so anymore. Now, keeping track of job advertisements can feel like a full-time job in itself. With employers posting vacancies across multiple forms of media and a variety of online platforms, there is a serious risk that your ideal roles will pass you by without you ever even being aware they existed.

Our employment search programme is designed to help prevent you from missing out in this way. It makes it quick and easy to look for roles that are relevant to your skill set and that are based in the locations you want to work in. This programme will make your job search more efficient and effective.

Cover Letter Design

Cover letters introduce you to prospective employers. They give you an opportunity to convey your suitability for the role by highlighting relevant qualifications, skills, experience, personality traits and interests. Provided along with your CV, these documents are one of the most essential elements of your job applications. They can be particularly important if you are launching a new career and don’t have a great deal of experience that you can refer to in your resume. This means it’s vital that you know how to write a compelling cover letter.

Deciding what to include and what to omit from these letters can be difficult. The documents should be succinct, but you don’t want to leave out important details that will help you to get noticed. Fortunately, help is at hand. As part of our career support package, we provide information on how to write these documents. We will give you cover letter tips including everything from how to format the document to the most appropriate tone to strike and the sort of information you should include.

Student References

If you get to the interview stage when applying for a job, it’s likely that the HR officer or hiring manager responsible for recruitment will ask for a list of references. If this happens, it is important that you provide the details of relevant referees who are familiar with your abilities and experience.

But if you’re just starting out in your career or you’ve retrained to transition into a new career, you may not be able to provide professional references. This is where we come in. As part of our career services package, we are able to provide reference letters for students who’ve successfully graduated their courses. This can be crucial in demonstrating to prospective employers that you have the necessary knowledge and skills to perform a role.

Too often, people view the references they provide during the recruitment process as a trivial matter. In fact, this element of your application can have a major impact on your ability to secure the positions you want. ICI is here to help you with student resume references.

Job Interview Preparation

You might be the ideal candidate for a job, but if you fail to impress during your interview, you won’t secure the role. This means it’s essential that you prepare thoroughly for these question and answer sessions. ICI is here to help you do precisely this. You should look at interview technique as an entirely separate skill from the professional training you have undertaken. Our experts will help you to hone this technique.

We’ll provide you with tips on how to get yourself ready for an interview, and how to answer the questions you are likely to face. We’ll cover everything from the importance of researching the organisation you apply to, to prepping for commonly asked questions, to thinking of questions you would like to ask the employer. This preparation will give you added confidence and help you to showcase yourself in the best possible light during your interview.

Free Unlimited Consultations

Whether you want to find employment or you’re keen to start a company and be your own boss, our professional tutors and staff are on hand to give you all the information and guidance you need. Arrange a free student career advice consultation to tap tutors’ in-depth knowledge of the industry and gain key insights that will help you to advance your career.

Our student counselling services can cover a broad range of topics, from helping you to narrow down your options to advising you on career research and providing you with information and advice on employment markets. We’ll help you to understand the possibilities, weigh up the pros and cons of certain choices and target the right employers.

Discover more

If you would like to find out more about the range of career services available to ICI students, don’t hesitate to contact us.