Your feedback counts

Across our events, appointments, various schemes and online learning pathways we ask for your feedback to help us tailor our activities to the needs of future students.

Please get involved by filling in feedback requests, attending a focus group or you can email us at careers@manchester.ac.uk

Careers Service focus groups (2025) - what's next?

Firstly a big thank you to all those you signed up and attended, it was great to hear from so many of you, we really value your thoughts and honesty.

So what happens next?

  1. We now have a report that will be shared with the Careers Service team.
  2. The leadership team will look at the focus group findings from the student, employer and University of Manchester stakeholder groups to understand key themes, conflicts and synergies.
  3. Careers Service staff will have an opportunities to share their ideas and discuss how to take forward agreed strategic priorites and any changes to our provision.

However, we have already taken some actions based on your feedback.

  • You said it wasn't clear the connection between the Careers Service, our website, our communications and our CareerConnect portal.
    • Branding on CareerConnect has been updated to ensure that its clear that its part of the Careers Service, email communications that come from us via our CareerConnect portal also have the new Careers Service branding on them.
  • You said that you were not aware of our YouTube channel and the recorded events there.
    • We have tried to make this more prominent on the home page of our website. (The link is on the bottom of every page too)
  • You were not aware that we have an instagram account (9,000 followers and counting) and that we post weekly event calendars there as well as advice on what to do now.
    • We have also tried to make this more prominent on the home page of our website. (the link is on the bottom of every page too)
  • You said the website was hard to navigate and you missed finding out about things.
    • We will be working on our web page over summer to try to improve navigation. We would love to redesign it but we need to wait for IT updates to the templates for this. In the mean time if you cant find something, try using the internal site search at the top of each page.

CV support feedback 2024/25

Using your feedback on our CV pathway, appointments and clinics we will be reviewing all our CV support for the next academic year and adjusting anything we can for the rest of this year.

CV Clinics

We have increased the number of and capacity in CV clinics as a response to your feedback that you wanted some more informal help in getting started with your CV without necessarily having a job in mind.

During the CV clinics on campus we asked for your feedback. We are really happy that so many of you have attended so far and found it useful.

Several of you mentioned that you attended the clinic because CV appointments fill up quickly so you were not able to book one.

CV appointments are released on a rolling 24 hour basis so that they are available for those last minute applications. We are aware however, that on occasion demand is higher than we are able to meet. We have been able to provide some extra appointments with existing staff and plan to recruit more staff in the new year.

There were lots of comments saying that were not confident in tailoring your CV

The CV pathway is a good place to start with understanding how to tailor your CV, and we will be looking to see if we can add some additional guidance to help you. The CV clinics are really only a first step, so please do book a CV review for more detail on tailoring your CV for a specific job or purpose.

Some of you asked for feedback on cover letters and other applications

We do offer online support in our Pathways and provide appointments for these too. We will look at providing a drop in service for these if we have staff availability.

CareerSet Feedback

We asked for your feedback on the CareerSet AI feedback tool for CVs and cover letters. 92% of users of the CV Pathway found CareerSet useful to help them create and then tailor their CV.

Some of you mentioned that you found the comments CareerSet gave confusing or you didn't trust it.

We know AI is not perfect, and we will try to provide some more guidance on how to use CareerSet. However, it is just a tool no matter how highly it scores your CV, we would recommend coming to a CV review appointment to get some additional support the first time you use a CV to apply for a job.

CV Pathway and web content

You asked for more example CVs

We have provided a new bank of example CVs this year and they are all on our website.

Some of you asked for very specific support relating to sectors or types of roles.

The principles for writing a good CV are always the same, it is down to undertanding how to tailor it to the job description. We will try to make this clearer but cannot give examples or guidelines for every individual situation. A good starting point is researching what the employer is looking for so that you have a good list of the skills, experience or attributes that you need to evidence. If you are not confident in doing this why not book a careers meeting to discuss the role or sector you are interested in and how your skills match.