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

Your career, your say & a chance to win £1,000

We've partnered with Cibyl for this year's Graduate Research survey, which asks students and graduates like you about your career aspirations, decisions and next steps.

Cibyl helps employers and careers services understand your experiences and what you need as you enter the working world.

Your anonymous answers will help us identify your preferences and the support you need after graduation.

Share what you think about careers, employers and the world of work by taking part in Cibyl Graduate Research.

It takes around 15 minutes to complete, and everyone receives a free personalised career personality report covering your strengths and roles you might want to explore.

Plus, as a thank you for taking part, you could win:

  • £1,000 gift card of your choice (1 winner)
  • £100 PayPal gift card (15 winners)
  • £25 weekly prize of your choice (20 winners)

Have your say.

[TAKE THE SURVEY]

2026 Focus groups and feedback

This year we wanted to take a deeper look into the products and services we provide to see if they offering value for money and the most effective advice.

CV and application advice

  • We took a good look at the feedback you provided on our CV and application pathways and our appointments.
  • We spoke to our Student Careers Coaches about their observations in appointments with you. They said that most of you found tailoring your application to the job was the hardest part of writing a CV.
  • We examined carefully the effectiveness of the advice given by CareerSet in the context of most students telling us they use AI to help with CVs and applications.

Outcomes and observations

We trialled allowing access to CV appointments without the need to use CareerSet and our pathway advice. We found higher numbers of students and graduates booked appointments with little detriment to the quality of the first draft of their application.

We feel that removing the CV pathway offers more students the opportunity to engage with us without barriers. We aknowledge that demand is likely to increase and we have reallocated funding accordingly - employing more Student Careers Coaches to provide appointments.

We have rewritten our CV advice pages to provide more help on articulating your skills and tailoring applications. As well as advice on how to use AI effectively.

Advice for international students

  • We ran a focus group with international students to look at 3 products which aim to help international students find work in the UK and or overseas.
  • We ran a Global Student Advisory Board session with the Students Union to understand international student perceptions of the job market and the Careers Service.

Outcomes and observations

  • It's clear that International students are finding the job market in the UK tough and are looking internationally for jobs.
  • Although a variety of platforms aim to help students find sponsored opportunities in the UK the user experience was not necessarily any better than using AI or an informed jobsearch.
  • Again we found that awareness of the advice or services that we do provide was patchy and we need to do more to communicate effectively. (We welcome your ideas!)
  • A number of your concerns and ideas will be taken to our international working group to take forward.

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.