Careers guidance and support
The Careers Service offers a wealth of tailored support to help you find and pursue your career goals.
It doesn’t matter what subject you choose to study, whether you’re planning on entering the job market when you graduate or are interested in further study, we can support you in whatever choice is right for you.
We also offer careers support for recent alumni, so even after you have graduated you can access our expert advice.
Maximising your potential
The Careers Service offers a wealth of tailored support to help University of Oxford students develop their skills and put themselves in the best possible position for entering the jobs market or progressing their career.
Whatever career you are interested in, and whichever degree you are taking, the Oxford University Careers Service is here to provide expert advice and resources.
The Careers Service really is great. They're so helpful and have some amazing resources.
Anna
- Annual careers fairs, across a range of sectors, so you can meet employers and explore your options
- Events and workshops on a wide range of career-related topics, run by employers and careers advisers
- 1:1 careers advice appointments for students with our expert careers advisers
- Our internship programmes exclusively for Oxford students
- 10,000+ vacancies advertised on our website
- Our exclusive skills programmes to help you develop and build employability skills across a range of sectors
- Access to Career Weaver, our web based app, to help you identify your skills, strength, preferences and motivations
- Continued careers support.
Oxford graduates go into many different sectors:
Sector | Percentage of graduates |
|---|---|
| Research & development (including research services) | 17% |
| Banking, investment & financial services | 13% |
| Education (including academia, higher education, teaching etc) | 12% |
| Health & social care | 12% |
| Business & management (FMCG, HR and retail) | 9% |
| Creative industries (including culture and heritage, marketing, media and the screen industries) | 9% |
| Technology (IT, data and AI) | 7% |
| Consultancy | 6% |
| Law | 5% |
| Charities, not for profits & think tanks | 2% |
| Civil engineering, construction & property | 2% |
| Engineering & manufacturing | 2% |
| Government & the Civil Service | 2% |
| Energy | 1% |
| Sustainability & the environment | 1% |
Source: Graduate Outcomes Survey 2017-21 (data collected 15 months after graduation)
Skills-building
Today’s competitive and global job market means that work experience and employability skills are increasingly important to early career success.
Here are eight of the employability skills we focus on here at Oxford and believe it’s important for students to develop:
- Business awareness
- Initiative
- Communication
- Creativity
- Planning
- Leadership
- Self-management
- Teamwork
The Careers Service offers lots of ideas for developing these skills within and outside of the university setting. We also run a number of skills programmes to help you develop these:
- Insight Programmes to give you a greater insight and understanding of a range of sectors such as Strategy & Management, Publishing, Teaching, Medicine, Start-ups and Pharma/Biotech.
- Future Leader Innovation Programme is a skills development programme from the Oxford University Careers Service and EnSpire Oxford, open to students who want to gain skills, knowledge, and positive behaviours to innovate and drive change in the future.
And don’t forget there are also hundreds of societies, teams or clubs to take part in. Apart from being a lot of fun and a great way to make friends, this can also help you develop employability skills such as time management, leadership and teamwork.
Exclusive internships
Our Internship Office provides research and professional work experience placements, exclusively to Oxford students. Our two largest programmes are the Summer Internship Programme and the Micro-Internship Programme.
The Summer Internship Programme
The Summer Internship Programme provides access to hundreds of funded summer internship opportunities. These are offered by our international alumni, multi-national corporations, world-leading NGOs, cutting-edge research institutions and many other organisations. Each year students undertake internships, gaining valuable work experience and undertaking interesting projects.
The Summer Internship Programme also gives students the chance to explore work experience options in a variety of sectors in the UK. The internships are full-time for 2-12 weeks during the summer vacation and each one is a defined project, managed by a supervisor, which creates real value for the host organisation and valuable learning experience for the student.
The Micro-Internship Programme
The Micro-Internship Programme provides students with convenient, short-term work placements based in the UK and mainland Europe. The programme offers a large volume of placements across a full range of sectors, taking place in each vacation period at the end of every Oxford term. These are voluntary, full - time work experiences lasting between 2-5 days.
Each placement provides an excellent snapshot into the workings of the organisation and its sector, as well as valuable transferable experience for your CV.
Internships can take place remotely, or in-person at the host employer's premises. These arrangements are considered carefully according to the circumstances surrounding each placement.
Here are examples of some of the internship opportunities our students have had in the past:
- Intern for UNICEF Jordan (Amman, Jordan)
- Intern at the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford, UK)
- Shepperton Studios (Surrey, UK)
- Publishing intern for Tradewind Books (Vancouver, Canada)
- Legal intern, World Food Programme (Rome, Italy)
Continued careers support
The Careers Service offers tailored support and access to a variety of careers and employability resources to Oxford University alumni.
All alumni can:
- Search our job vacancy board on CareerConnect.
- Meet employers at our careers fairs.
- Attend tailored events such as our ‘Career Management Strategy Masterclass Webinar’ and the ‘Alumni @ the Fair’ sessions.
- Sign up for the termly Alumni Careers Newsletter.
- Access our comprehensive online resources.
Recent alumni can also access one-to-one careers advice appointments. Those within two years of their course-end date can book an advice appointment outside term-time with an Oxford careers adviser for personalised career support.
Find out more about how we support alumni.
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