Oliver Hearsum joined the KG Moore team this week. A recent university graduate, he’s keen to buckle down, work hard and learn as much as he can about marketing, in the real world. In this blog post, he shares his take on securing his first marketing job.
From the moment I put my pen down in my last exam as a University student I was instantly reminded, by my lecturers and parents alike, that now it is time for the real world.
The real world, something that whilst inherently daunting, is what my hard work at University has been working towards.
The competitive nature of the graduate labour market is heavily publicised, with recent figures suggesting as many as 65 candidates apply for each graduate position on average. This resulted in my fellow students and I leaving the exam hall with no idea about what the future entailed for us. Many discussed their intention to take an impromptu gap year by finding work in a job that they had no intention of pursuing long-term or deciding to spend the year travelling (finances permitting).
Fortunately these considerations did not occupy my attention for very long, as just one week after losing my student status (and the favourable shop discounts that accompany such a title), I was recruited by KG Moore Ltd in the role of Digital Marketing Executive.
In a previous blog article I spoke about my belief as to the importance of obtaining work experience and I believe this has been exemplified after being recruited full time by KG Moore. I thoroughly enjoyed the two and a half weeks that I spent with the company in the summer of 2013 and that is why I am thrilled to be returning. I believe I learnt a lot in such a short period of time and I am excited to see how I develop in the role over the next six months.
One of my lecturers at the University of East Anglia on multiple occasions re-iterated his belief that it would be more beneficial for us to seek employment at a smaller organization. A view that concurred with that of Lord Young’s, the Enterprise Tsar to David Cameron, expressed in an article you can read here. He warned us to not be drawn to the ‘bright lights’ of the larger employers where you are seen as being ‘a small cog in the overall operation’. Instead it is believed that smaller organisations allow for more responsibility and the opportunity to work on a number of diverse tasks. This certainly seems the case for me, with a varied job specification, accompanied by the chance to work closely with Marketing Strategist, Kim Moore, which provides me with the perfect opportunity to nurture my skills.
Ask any of the 300 strong Business Management students that I will be graduating with this summer, at my University alone, which industry they wanted to work in and marketing will always be the most popular retort, followed by a few aspiring salespeople and accountants. To have secured a role in such a hotly contested industry is something that I am delighted about and an opportunity that I am keen to capitalise on.
