Welcome to the April edition of the Graduate Coach newsletter. 

I hope that you are all keeping well during this time. 

From myself and the team here at Graduate Coach, we wish you and your families a happy Easter! 

In this month’s newsletter, we will share advice on how you can enhance your career prospects during the lockdown, regardless of whether you are employed, looking for a job or a parent of a graduate. 

Please forward this message to anyone that you feel would benefit from it.  

Stay safe!

Chris

Thankfully, despite the pandemic, there are jobs opportunities available for graduates. However, you will need to adapt your job search method:

• Leverage Google’s job search feature by searching for specific job titles and filter the search results to show jobs that were posted within the past week. This is much more efficient than searching for jobs on each company’s site that you are interested in. For example: 

• Use Glassdoor, LinkedIn and Indeed. 

• Prepare for video interviews. 

• Acquire digital skills, the job market post lockdown will be in need of digitally skilled graduates.

Here is an excellent list of companies that have confirmed that they are hiring during COVID-19. 

If anyone would like to practice mock video interviews or if they need career advice, simply reply to this email to find out more about how I can help.

Whilst working from home for the first time has its benefits, here are a few tips to bear in mind in order to maintain your productivity: 

• Use the time you save from not commuting to read blogs by thought leaders in your industry and allied industries.

• Take regular breaks away from your screen, at least once an hour and walk around for at least five minutes.

• Use the Pomodoro Technique, which is a fantastic way to keep you focused. Find out more about it here.

• One of our grads gave a great piece of advice, which is to hide your phone in another room!

• Another grad is checking in regularly with fellow workers so they can have the equivalent of 'water cooler' conversations, even though they are not in the office. A number of them have also started WhatsApp or Slack groups to share news and insights. 

We have put together this blog post on working from home during the Coronavirus outbreak.

Parents, you have a useful role to play! Please give as much comfort to your sons and daughters and tell them that you too, when younger, have lived through hard times. 

In my time, I have experienced three or four very big recessions and in each instance, you get through them and life returns to normal. The country will return to normal after Coronavirus. Times are tough, things will get better. Please help your kids to stay optimistic.

To find out how we can help your son or daughter to land a good job, download our 2020 prospectus.

1. Five of the graduates that we are coaching are thriving on our SEO pathway! They are well on track to land good jobs as SEO executives. The pathway has been designed to upskill our graduates and make them highly employable within the Digital Marketing industry.
   
   It follows the 70:20:10 model of learning and development, where our graduates learn by doing (70%), learn from others (20%) and learn by engaging with resources, such as online courses, articles and videos (10%)
    

2. One of the graduates we are coaching recently got offered a job at a leading digital agency. 

3. We are creating two new courses that will launch at the end of April: one in Account Management and the other in PPC.

If any parent or graduate reading this would like any help, please email me and myself and the team at Graduate Coach will do our very best to help you.
 

One last thought...when the UK starts rehiring then those grads with digital skills and aptitudes will be in very high demand. 

If you know anyone who is currently unemployed, we can share with them our links to free Google accredited courses and other resources. 

I am encouraging every grad now to buy our two books: the first one teaches you everything you need to know to get a graduate job and the second teaches you everything you need to know to do really well in your job. 

You can get your copies on Amazon here:

The Student Book

The Graduate Book

Good luck everybody and remember: a problem shared is a problem halved, so if you or your son or daughter needs help, just reach out!