The CMD opportunities board: Discover experiences with our partners.

This week for the CMD Newsletter, we are talking about experience. All the places you can get it and why students undervalue the experience they have. 

TLDR:

If you are earning or learning, it is experience.

Part-time and "regular" work experience is just as important as the flashy internship.

All you need from "professional experience" as a student is market exposure, a project which shows you added value to the employer, and a platform to grow your network. 

Societies, self-directed technical and creative projects and open source contributions all count as experience. If they are in your professional sector, they have professional experience. 

Recently, I was talking to a marketing student who is struggling to secure a placement. I saw a post by them a few weeks ago and thought it was worth reaching out. After all, we have started taking on student marketers to help us with our Instagram and LinkedIn presence. I asked them what they needed out of the experience. 

They weren't sure.

I gave them some options. Sometimes, placements are good for money, maybe you don't work part-time during your studies, and a placement is a nice injection of cash to tie you over. Experience is a good thing to get from a placement too; you can find out what you like and don't like about a sector and figure out the next steps for university. Market exposure is also great; having a new opportunity to connect with professionals and develop networks is important. Now, let's assume we could only have two of those things. 

We have to choose between:

Money

Experience 

Market Exposure 

What would be most valuable to you?

They thought about it and answered with experience and market exposure. Okay, that makes sense. 

Have you looked at Freelancing platforms like Upwork and Fiverr? That is how we started the B2B side of CMD Careers. Freelancing gives you experience not only in marketing but in securing your own deals, contracting, selling your services and developing your brand. Marketing is also probably one of the best-suited degrees for this type of experience. 

They started building a new portfolio and created a freelancing strategy. Working small jobs to prove their social proof value and then progressing into bigger and more impressive projects. The great thing about this?

All the projects were owned by them, giving them tonnes of metrics and proof of value for the marketing firm that hires them.

This type of "build your own experience" exists in every degree.

I know CompSci students who grind LeetCode, GitHub and technical projects. Don't keep that work secret; make it known. LinkedIn is a self-promotional platform, so if you are doing something cool that the market will value, then tell people about it. Next time recruiters come looking for an SWE, maybe that open source coding project you worked on will push you into the "yes" pile.

If you need help finding some experience, we have designed an opportunities space that is slightly different to a jobs board with these roles designed to fit around your studies and give you a foot in the door. Working with our partners, we are putting together a list of roles from volunteering to fully salaried positions.

If you like the idea of a role, speak to us about it; likewise, if you see a role somewhere else, send us the job description, and we can help you get some accessible prep time for it in our 1-1 mentoring sessions on the weekend. We cover CV support and reviews, aptitude test prep, HireVue simulations, interview prep and run-throughs and commercial awareness and networking strategies.

The goal at university is to get experience. If you are earning or learning, then it is worthwhile that you don't need the perfect internship day 1; you just need to keep progressing forward.

When you start the upward trajectory with consistent momentum, you will be amazed at how fast things turn around.