When you start out in a career, it can be difficult to get your first job in the trade or profession you have chosen. If you want a career in business, you could be considering the world of finance, some sort of management or maybe the marketing or the consulting industry. These can all be harder to break into than many other professions, and here we try to help with 3 tips for people struggling to get into business as a career.
Obtain the Qualifications Required
The first thing to do is to look closely to see which qualifications are needed to progress into your chosen business career. A business degree, for instance, can be a stepping-stone to many different sorts of jobs, although for some of them, such as accounting, further studies would be needed. A general business degree will cover many different areas, but you can also take a combined degree in things like business and marketing as an example, where you will still get a sound grounding in business, but also some specialist knowledge of the marketing industry.
Many business career opportunities will not be available to anyone without the right qualifications, and there are many universities and colleges that will have the course you need. If you are already working in another job or have family commitments so cannot attend a physical building, you can take most of the courses online, letting you fit in the studying hours to suit your lifestyle.
Experience Is Usually Needed
You can have all the qualifications in the world, but employers are going to be reluctant to give you a job if you have no experience. Of course, there will always be a few that are looking for newly qualified personnel, but there are many more that specify ‘experience needed’ as part of the job advertisement.
One way to get some experience is to work for a temping agency. These can provide you with placements that will give you valuable experience to put on your CV. It can also be good to move in and out of various jobs as it can give you a better perspective of how different companies work.
In places like London, temp agencies are often used to staff business parties and events, which could give you an opportunity to do some networking to improve your business contacts. In order to find a temp job here in London that is business oriented, using services such as staff heroes, where you can easily search for different temp jobs can be useful. Companies will use temporary workers to cover sickness, maternity, holidays and other absences, and sometimes these can lead to a permanent position for the temporary worker.
You can also think of these as a sort of trial. If you work for a temping agency, it lets you see exactly what employers will expect of you, and there is not really any other way of testing what sort of employer you want to work for long term.
Be Confident in Yourself
When you are attending a job interview be confident about your own abilities. If you do not appear to have any confidence in yourself, an employer will have no confidence in you either, no matter how many qualifications you have. Do not be afraid to ask questions about the tasks you will be expected to perform, about holiday and sickness pay and any other queries you may have. Do they have a company pension scheme, for example, or does a company car come with the job?
Always remember that employment is a two-way thing. The company has to want you to work for them, but you have to want to work there as well. There could be conditions in the employment that you are not happy with, so even if you are offered the job, it can be a case of thanks but no thanks and moving your search elsewhere.
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