Student success at this year's Future Focus: Careers Conference
Newcastle University Business School students enjoyed a busy week at this year’s Future Focus: Careers Conference which proved to be a huge success.
25 November 2022
Newcastle University Business School students enjoyed a busy week at this year’s Future Focus: Careers Conference which proved to be a huge success.
Future Focus: Careers Conference is an annual event open to all students at the Business School. The purpose of the event is to allow students to find out about careers in different sectors. This year, the week was made up of in-person and online events and was broken down into industry and skills development days.
A taste of the graduate market
Students had the chance to speak first-hand to employers and alumni and get a taste of what a career in their chosen field would be like.
Our visiting alumni have excelled in their fields and offered students valuable advice on how to enter the graduate market.
Neil Hancock (Information Systems BSc, 2006) studied at Newcastle University’s School of Computing but has ended up in a career in Marketing. He now works as Marketing Director at Visualsoft, an e-commerce and marketing agency based in the North East.
Economics students gained insights from Peter Wilson (Economics BSc, 2010), who is now an Executive Director at UBS. Peter discussed the importance of making every second count as a student. He also explained how he still uses every part of his Economics degree (macroeconomics, stats, behavioural economics) every day in his role.
The Business School is still celebrating their 20th Anniversary of the Flying Start programme. The Flying Start programme is a four-year honours degree in Business, Accounting and Finance in partnership with ICAEW and PwC. Students on this programme gain real work experience through a paid placement at PwC. The Business School welcomed back Sumeet Dhillon (2017 graduate) to share his experience with PwC and his current role as Sports Business Group Manager at Deloitte.
Sumeet gave students an insight into the importance of networking and how a passion and interest can have an impact on their career. Sumeet has a love for football and through playing 5-a-side against Deloitte, he landed his dream role, all through the power of networking.
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Valuable Insight
The Careers and Employability Team were delighted with how the week turned out, Cian O’Sullivan one of the Careers Consultants at Newcastle University Business School explained the value of having alumni at career-based events.
Cian said: “Our Future Focus: Careers Conference 2022 was a massive success due in no small part to our alumni. Over the entire week, we had various alumni in the School, speaking on panels, presenting about their sectors and helping us do speed interviews. These interviews are really beneficial to students who have never had interviews before. Seeing our alumni come back on campus and help them learn about the various industries they work in, what to do (and what not to do), even just spending time talking to them about their futures makes, such an impact on our students.”
Cian also added how our current students take on advice from their peers from previous cohorts.
Cian added: “When the advice comes from our alumni, it hits differently. It has a great impact on the student body. We had several examples of students coming up to us after the various sessions quoting advice given to them by our alumni, motivated and energised by their predecessors. We’d like to thank all our alumni who took part in the event, not just for the great help we received this week but across the calendar year, it is greatly appreciated and has a huge impact on our students.”