5 easy micro-experiences that'll help you take the next steps in your career journey

By Ann Duff, Careers Manager

A micro-experience is a small-scale, light touch, personalised experience chosen by you that develops your career thinking. Micro-experiences are personalised by you, to your interests. They help you surface your skills and strengths, develop your knowledge about potential career paths and help you to feel empowered.

They matter because they're an easy, small, low-risk way for you to build your employability. Imagine a jigsaw: Every small piece is a valuable part of the whole that you can build at your own pace to create the final picture. Each one of those jigsaw pieces is a micro-experience.

Your years at UofG are a good time and a safe space to experiment with your ideas. Try something new, challenge yourself, absorb information, but above all, get involved. Use your time as a student for information gathering, building your awareness of the world of work and understanding yourself.

There are loads of things that could be classed as micro-experiences, so collated below are some of the best (in my humble opinion) to get you going.

Engage with your community

This could be as simple as following social accounts of professionals or organisations you admire as well as UofG Careers .

If you're interested in a particular type of job, start to follow the organisations and people in this space, especially here on LinkedIn . Doing this will boost your knowledge and move you from the ideas stage to the reality stage.

Join professional associations and societies aligned with particular career areas. These are usually free or affordable for students. Joining a professional body gives you access to the community, events and jobs you might not see advertised elsewhere.

Join a club or society . You’ll learn all sorts of things about yourself, develop your transferable skills and make connections and form a community.

Stay up-to-date through careers and employability newsletters

You'll receive one from Careers & Global Opportunities (C&GO), and you may receive others from your school or college. You'll find them in your student inbox. Act on what you see there: attend, connect, apply.

The C&GO weekly newsletter is all things careers for all students. You'll find valuable information about events, job and internship opportunities, career advice, stories from students abroad and much more.

Your college, school or subject newsletters and other communications tend to be curated just for you. They've trawled the information; cherry-picked the best and collated it. It's so worth your while reading these.

Go on a scouting exercise to careers events

There are tons of UofG Careers events and coming to one will:

• help you understand the range of opportunities and organisations employers out there.
• help you to plan your future.
• be a good day out, possibly with freebies, snacks and great chat.

Get work experience

This could be big or small, time-intensive or not, professional or casual—everything has a value.

In the context of part-time jobs, I am going to ban a word from your vocabulary. That word is 'just'. I hear from students all the time that they have 'just' worked in a part-time job. Part-time, casual work is paid which is handy, but you also develop excellent professional, transferable skills that any employer will rate highly.

Volunteering makes you feel good about yourself and the impact you are making, but it's also valuable for developing your transferable skills. Also consider volunteering in a sector in which you see yourself working professionally.

It used to be the case that internships were traditionally done in the summer of your penultimate year, but they've become more flexible. An internship can be done in any year of study and at any time during the year. Internships tend to be more professional, time-bound, often project-based and across the entire world of work.

Job shadowing can be a beneficial experience. To pursue job shadowing, identify people who're doing the types of jobs or working in the types of organisations that you're interested in. Ask them if they would let you job shadow them for a day or a few days. Always be polite and professional in your approach. Often, they'll have to check with someone else, usually a manager. Be brave, what have you got to lose?

Go abroad for summer

You might be able to go abroad for a summer school .

Even the shortest experience abroad can let you expand on your current subject expertise, explore new subjects, develop your transferable skills and/or improve on a foreign language. Plus, you might be eligible for funding. Summer school is open to all undergraduates, except those in final year.

Most students do a year or semester abroad in their third-year, which means starting your planning at the end of first-year or early in second-year.

Remember, when it comes to career preparation, you can start small. All experiences are valuable.