Open Impact

November has been one of the busiest months we have ever experienced in our interactions with business and industry!

In the week that Lewis Hamilton won the F1 Drivers and Constructors’ Championship for Mercedes AMG, the company’s Head of Electronics is giving a talk to our student branch of the IEEE. Only a few days ago, third-year Electronics student Josh Oldfield was attending the National Microelectronics Institute annual dinner as runner-up in the UK Electronic Skills Foundation ‘Scholar of the Year’ competition.

ARM and Imagination Technologies have both held fast-track interview sessions in the School and companies visiting ECS to give presentations or provide support to students this month include NCC, J P Morgan, New Voice Media, FactSet, Goldman Sachs, Accenture, Bloomberg, Entrepreneur First, MLH, QinetiQ, Halma, Cundall, Thales, IBM, National Instruments, and ECTalent. New companies joining the Careers Hub this month include Acano, Babcock, Davide Leone & Partners, Haseltine Lake, Oxford Computer Consultants, Sparx, TE Connectivity, and Unboxed Consulting. We now have over 140 companies on our Affiliated webpage, and over 60 companies are booked to attend our annual Engineering and Technology Careers Fair on 10 February.

Our employability figures for ECS graduates in 2013 (the latest available) reflect the high degree of interest that employers have in ECS students. ECS Electronics and Electrical Engineering graduates had an employment rate of 96 per cent six months after graduating in 2013, and Computer Science and IT graduates 95 per cent. These are outstanding figures and place us amongst the top five universities in the UK for our subjects.

We continue to work very hard with our partner companies to create events and opportunities that are of value to them as well as to our students, and to help ensure that our students are well informed about career choices, and well prepared for the application and selection process. Students (especially since the advent of tuition fees) are more motivated to explore career opportunities from the earliest days of their degree courses and keen to undertake summer internships after their first year. Part of our offer to prospective students centres on our excellent links with leading companies, and the strong relationships we already have with our Laureate and Affiliated companies, as well as with sector partnerships such as the Power Academy and the UK Electronic Skills Foundation.

November is, of course, a peak time for careers, since many organizations have their closing date for graduate applications over the next few weeks. But  careers are not just for Christmas! and with our Careers Fair fast approaching on 10 February and then the next round of applications for summer internships opening up, careers and employability is now very much a year-round activity!

For further information about the ECS Careers Hub, contact Joyce Lewis;  tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453.