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New Year, New Start

Employability Service

Category: Student support services

25 January 2023

A fresh twelve months of adventure and possibility lies ahead, and we hope you’re as excited as we are. According to the Chinese zodiac, 2023 is the Year of the Rabbit and forecast to be ‘a year of hope’ - and extremely lucky for those born in the year of Rabbit, Goat, Pig and Rat.

If you’re a zodiac cynic you may be rolling your eyes at the idea of luck influencing your personal success/happiness, but ‘Luck Factor’ research indicates that we can create and manage luck and happenstance to engineer or influence positive outcomes. So here are some top tips which we hope will help you make 2023 a happy new year.

Maximise Opportunities

Embrace new opportunities in 2023 and good things may come your way. Make time to grow network connections via events such as our Futures Festival: Graduate Edition (20-24th February 2023), the Spring Jobs & Opportunities Fair (1st March 2023), and explore our new platform Handshake to book your place (and set up your profile). Self-development workshops on topics such as Networking and LinkedIn are available throughout the trimester to support you in developing confidence and embracing opportunity.

Listen to Lucky Hunches

Sometimes we have an instinctive sense of what’s right for us, but don’t always act on it because we’re shy or scared. Make 2023 the year you listen to what your heart tells you and be brave enough to act on it. Developing new skills, new connections or new knowledge can feel scary at first but they are an important part of enabling you to develop the graduate confidence and work-readiness that we want all ARU students to leave the university with. And we don’t expect you to achieve all this alone. ‘Drop In’ for a chat with an Adviser (Monday to Friday, 11am – 2pm Chelmsford and Cambridge and 12-2pm at Peterborough) or book an Appointment, and the Employability Team will be happy to talk through your career ideas and do our best to help you make them happen.

Expect Good Fortune

Adopting a growth mindset can lead to great opportunities and support your wellbeing and resilience. Carol Dweck’s research on the power of self-belief highlights how much we can influence outcomes with a positive mental attitude.  Embrace new opportunities and challenges with an open mind and try to look forwards positively. Mindset can also have a huge impact on our networking confidence and help to overcome imposter syndrome (essentially the belief that everyone else knows what they’re doing except you). Check out Amy Cuddy’s TED Talk on the power of body language and start looking at the world with a posture of confidence and expected success.

Turn Bad Luck to Good

Whether you believe in luck or not, it isn’t something we can directly control. What we can manage is our own reaction to negative events or ‘bad luck’. Stephen Covey’s research (author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People) introduces a tool called the Circle of Concern vs Circle of Influence. This highlights the importance of recognising what we can influence / take action on while also acknowledging factors that worry us but that we cannot do much about. This is a fantastic tool that can be mentally liberating and means we can consciously re-direct worry into positive action elsewhere. Taking learning from negative outcomes is also important. If 2022 presented challenges that may be ‘holding you back’, reflect on these positively to identify what learning you can take from these experiences so that you’re better equipped to navigate any challenges in the year ahead. This mental filing exercise can be a positive way of achieving closure on difficult chapters, and a powerful reminder of how much you’ve really achieved - even if the outcome wasn’t what you expected.

Happy New Year

We hope that you’re feeling more confident and excited for the Year of the Rabbit after reading these quick tips. Remember, the Employability & Careers Service is here to support you at every stage of your degree, and (in person) for up to three years after degree completion. You also have lifetime access to Career Centre which has resources to support you in identifying new year goals, including Career Pulse, including your Personal Career Development Plan and Self-Assessment resources. We can’t wait to see what adventures 2023 will bring and look forward to supporting you in the year ahead.

By Khrieu Healy, Employability & Careers Adviser




Our Employability Service works with students throughout their time at ARU and after they graduate. The Service offers careers advice, online resources, and help with job searches, applications and interview preparation. Our Employability & Careers Advisers may mention some of these resources and services in their blogs, to give you an idea of the careers support that's on offer at ARU. Some of these resources sit behind a log in and can only be accessed by current students.

Disclaimer

The views expressed here are those of the individual and do not necessarily represent the views of Anglia Ruskin University. If you've got any concerns please contact us.