Every year 400,000 students in the UK graduate with a degree: what makes you stand out?

Whether you are studying for an English, history, business or engineering degree, the one thing you will all have in common is the fact that you all need to know how to market yourself. If your goal is to secure employment at the end of your degree or to start your own business, you will need to be able to convince a potential employer or investor that you are the perfect candidate. This is essential whether you wish to work in the private, public, third sector or become self-employed. Regardless of your field, there will always be competition and the need to stand out.

Marketing and graduate development

Marketing is often seen as a business-related activity, but it is essential for every successful graduate. While at university you are developing your own individual brand. When employability is viewed in its crudest form, we are all products attempting to sell our skills in the graduate marketplace. Consider the definition of a product as:

Anything that can be offered to a market for attention, acquisition, use or consumption that might satisfy a want or need.

(Kotler et al., 2016)

If we place this in the context of employability, the market would be the graduate employment market and the skills we seek to develop throughout our degree would represent ‘anything that can be offered to a market’, and we would hope that these skills would ‘satisfy a want or need’ of a potential employer.

As a result, strong analogies can be drawn between the development of a product and the development of graduates. The skills developed throughout a degree can be seen as the product features, the elements by which you seek to differentiate yourself from the competition – the other graduates in the marketplace.

If this analogy is extended and the marketing mix is considered, further correlations can be seen. The marketing mix is ‘the set of tactical marketing tools – product, price, place and promotion – that the firm blends to produce the response it wants in the target market’. (Kotler et al., 2016, p. 78) The four ‘P’s (product, price, promotion and place) are used by firms and graduates to bring about their desired outcomes – recruiting the best graduates and gaining employment respectively. If we review all of these elements in this context, strong correlations can be drawn.

By definition, price relates to ‘the amount of money charged for a product or service or the sum of the values that customers exchange for the benefits of having or using a product or service’. (Kotler et al., 2016, p. 324)

Salary is representative of price as it relates to the amount an employer is willing to pay for graduate services. As with price, salary is influenced by supply and demand and correlations can be drawn between surpluses and shortages in the marketplace dependent upon disciplines and skills. Competition also affects price and graduate recruiters will vary their price in order to make their offer attractive.

Salary, just like price, is influenced by the value a customer, in this case a graduate recruiter, attributes to acquiring new graduates. How important do companies see the acquisition of graduates to the development of their business and how much can they afford to pay?

Promotion in essence relates to how the value/benefit of a product is communicated to the target audience – in this instance, the way a graduate promotes his or her skills by the use of curriculum vitae, application forms, interviews and online profiles. Do not forget that graduate recruiters also want to recruit the best and so, in turn, adopt a promotion strategy in order to make their offer attractive to graduates by attending graduate recruitment fairs, advertising their graduate schemes and inviting students to career open days.

Place, as with product, relates to the distribution and the availability of the product. When looking for employment you will determine how far you are willing to travel and the location within which you are prepared to work. Graduate recruiters also distribute graduates throughout their organisation both locally and globally, representing a wide distribution network.

The career life cycle

The product life cycle (PLC) charts the progress of a ‘product’s sales and profits over its lifetime’. (Kotler et al., 2016) This model can also be modified to chart the development of a career. In the figure below, the PLC has been modified to represent the various stages of your career. At each stage, just as with a product, a strategy needs to be devised in order to sustain a positive result through continued career development represented by promotion, increase in salary or responsibility.

The product development stage represents the time you attend university and develop your skills prior to launching your product into the graduate market. The growth period represents the continued development of your career. It is at the mature stage that you have to make important career decisions in order to keep your career moving upwards.

Often companies in the mature phase will release an updated product with additional features to boost sales. At this stage the market has developed either due to the introduction of new technology or new processes and you have to update your skills or risk your skill set becoming outdated. To update skills students will often re-enter higher education at this stage to study for additional qualifications, either a Masters degree or professional qualifications. Others may return to education as a mature student to gain their first degree in order to enhance their career development.

The decline phase represents a shift in the market and highlights the fact that your skill set is not aligned with the job market. In many cases, this will result in redundancy. This can often kick-start the career life cycle, forcing a return to the product development stage.

Due to the increasingly competitive graduate market, and the increasing number of graduates in the marketplace, it has become imperative that graduates engage with the marketing of their skills in order to succeed. Employers can no longer differentiate between candidates based solely on their degree. You now have to consider what else you have to offer a potential employer.

As stated by McNair (2003), graduate employability has increased in importance ‘because of the changing nature of the graduate labour market, mass participation in HE, pressures on student finance, competition to recruit students and expectations of students, employers, parents and government (expressed in quality audits and league tables)’.

What do we mean when we talk about employability?

Employability

‘a set of achievements – skills, understanding and personal attributes – that makes graduates more likely to gain employment and be successful in their chosen occupations, which benefits themselves, the workforce, the community and the economy’

(Mantze Yorke, 2006)

‘a set of attributes, skills and knowledge that all labour market participants should possess to ensure they have the capability of being effective in the workplace – to the benefit of themselves, their employer and the wider community’

(CBI, 2011)

The CBI builds on this definition and identifies a set of employability skills, including:

• self-management
• communication and literacy
• team-working
• application of numeracy
• business and customer awareness
• application of information
• technology (IT)
• problem-solving
• positive attitude
• entrepreneurship/enterprise.

Source: Adapted from CBI, 2009

These skills are repeatedly identified as the core skills and attributes graduates need to be able to demonstrate upon graduation. The Global Graduates into Global Leaders Report (Diamond et al., 2008) stipulates that before graduates can even begin to consider developing the skills needed to compete on a global scale they need to ensure that they have developed the core skills and attributes listed above.

These skills are a prerequisite and are reinforced by the CMI report ‘21st Century Leaders’ (2014), when employers were asked to identify the skills required from graduates. Communication (67%), problem-solving (48%) and team-building (47%) were listed as the top three skills valued by employers. As a result, the skills identified in the CMI report are still very relevant for graduates entering the market in 2017.

The I Brand employability model

The I Brand employability model incorporates these skills but recognises the importance of an individual’s network, experience, enterprise and marketing skills. The model has been further developed to recognise the continually transforming and changing landscape within which organisations operate. It is important for graduates to not only develop their employability skills, but to also review how they can sustain their place within the marketplace.

A further four additional skills and attributes have been added to the I Brand employability model: integrity, adaptability, collaboration and digital impact. These four skills and attributes provide the students with the skills needed to future-proof their career development. The currency of experience is priceless when looking for a position. Repeatedly, employers will ask: ‘Do you have any experience?’ Often you can find yourself caught in a cycle whereby you can’t get a job because you don’t have any experience, but you can’t get any experience because you don’t have a job.

The elements of the I Brand employability model are discussed in further detail in Chapter 5. Essentially you are building your own individual brand to increase your employability – a brand being defined as ‘a name . . . that identifies the products or services of one seller . . . and differentiates them from those of competitors’. (Kotler et al., 2016, p. 691) Your brand will help you stand out from the competition – other graduates in the graduate market.

Developing your I Brand encourages you to develop your own skills and differentiate your product, to communicate your brilliance to potential employers. From day one at university you need to think about how you will complete your course, but also how you will become a successful graduate. The difference is that being a successful graduate is not merely limited to gaining your degree but also includes developing additional skills that make you more marketable and as a result increase your employability.

The definitions of employability reference the development of skills and attributes that cannot be developed overnight. To attain these skills graduates cannot leave it to chance or leave it to the day before graduation. Students often believe that graduation is far away, but the three or four years will pass very quickly. Students need to actively engage with their career development to ensure that upon graduation they have developed a brand employers want to buy.