Insights Into Oxford’s Careers Service Webinars

By Annie McKernan / @annwins.adventures

Today I tried my first Oxford Careers Service webinar, and it was refreshingly good.

I am somebody who tries a lot of free productivity webinars, ranging from Ali Abdaal’s Quarterly Alignment Workshops (which I would heavily recommend) all the way to coding and investment workshops. A problem I find with a lot of free workshops is that they are generally vague and lack actionable advice; they tend to be filled with buzzwords, saying a lot which sounds important, but leave you with little to actually take away.

I am glad to say that the Oxford Career Service Webinars defy this trend.

First of all, they are free! You should receive an email from the Careers Service detailing the current Term Planner : there is usually a mixture of both online and in-person events. As a student who is away for a year, I try and join relevant webinars that I can access remotely. After deciding what events you’d like to attend, you can click on them in the email to sign up and book your slot - it’s that easy! Unfortunately, the webinars don’t tend to be recorded so you will have to attend at the stated time.

The webinar I tried was called “First Steps to Successful Career Planning”. The host was extremely polite and open to us asking questions in the chat throughout. I appreciated how efficiently the host used the time by jumping straight into the content, and the self-assessment score at the beginning was a great way to quickly gauge whether or not the webinar would be valuable for us. It was nice to see a technologically-savvy host who could navigate anyone having technical issues – surprisingly rare in the webinar space! Too often with other free webinars you see hosts spending the first 15 minutes figuring out how to actually broadcast, but luckily no time was wasted here.

The PowerPoint was filled with thought-provoking questions and prompts that the host expanded upon throughout the presentation, such as considering the differences between a learned strength (something you may be good at, but don’t enjoy or find draining) and enjoyable strengths (which make you energized and motivated) and how to balance these in your career. He gave specific and actionable advice such as looking at job descriptions to see if it includes what you enjoy or not, and if you are looking to go into a specific area you can use common patterns found in job descriptions to help you decide what skills you should be working on. The PowerPoint was interactive, providing lots of resources which I will link at the end. You get what you give with these sorts of webinars; if you answered the questions well, you could leave the session having a rough idea of what you’re looking for in a career and the work culture you like. What would you want to keep from your career or studies? What would you want to leave behind? Whilst simple, these are good and effective questions that made the webinar a success for me.

I have since signed up to more Oxford Careers Service webinars and I hope you will find them as effective as I have. They’re an amazing free resource to have at your disposal, so make the most of them!