Why Nottingham is the place to be after uni

The Nottingham Post reported recently that demand for university interns to work at businesses in Nottingham looking to tap into student expertise has almost doubled this year.

A total of 48 organisations have taken on more than 80 interns this summer, almost double the number from last year, thanks to the Nottingham Internship Scheme, run by the University of Nottingham. The scheme is designed to help local small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) benefit from interns, while giving students the chance to gain unique and varied work experience.

We caught up with one former intern, Ben Garry, to find out why he wanted to stay in Nottingham after he graduated and what it was like interning at Creative Quarter-based company,Impression, where he's now got a permanent job.

I’ll be honest, when the final year of my English BA at the University of Nottingham began, I had no idea where I was going to end up the following summer. It didn’t take long for a barrage of emails from various graduate careers services to pile up in my inbox, but throughout most of the first term I was still considering doing an MA, let alone ready to seriously apply for jobs.

The one thing that I was clear on from the start is that I wanted to stay in Nottingham. Before coming to the city in 2013 I’d lived in a mid-sized town in West Sussex all my life, and despite the big shift in surroundings I quickly fell in love with my new home. I also saw enough over my three years of study to convince me that there were great employment opportunities here, and that there wasn’t any need to look to London like so many students seem to do by default. Whether I started with an MA or went straight into a job, I knew that it would be here.

Something else that became clear over that first term of third year was that the big grad schemes at massive companies just didn’t appeal to me. Since April in my second year I had been working on and off for Touchpoint Resource, a small digital recruitment agency that was, at the time, based in my home town of Horsham, doing all manner of tasks including moving their database from offline to the cloud, right through to managing their social media accounts. When I worked there, Touchpoint was made up of just four people: myself and the three founders. I loved the close-knit, friendly feel of the small office, and thrived on the increasing level of responsibility I was given. I definitely struggled with the thought of moving into a massive corporation where I would become one of thousands of employees.

By the time the final month of the autumn term came around, I started to have a clearer idea of where I wanted to end up. I wanted to stay in Nottingham, I had decided that a Masters wasn’t for me at this stage - I had realised that I was satisfied with what I had done at uni and was ready to move on - and I had worked out that I didn’t really want to work at a big company. I should also say that my taste of social media management at Touchpoint had convinced me to give digital marketing a go, and it fitted well with the skills I had learned on my degree.

By the end of November, I had something approaching a plan: find a local digital marketing business. I think the lesson from everything so far is that it pays to work through the factors informing your career choices methodically, but honestly. Being aware whether you really like or dislike something is important - for me, it was knowing that I liked small companies that had the most important impact.

Things really started moving forward with an event that I attended, Spotlight on Local Careers. Organised by the university’s careers service, this was an evening event attended by a variety of business with local offices. A representative from each business gave a short talk on what they do and how students might be able to get involved, and then there was time at the end for networking.

I was able to get talking to Aaron Dicks, one of Impression’s Managing Directors, and it became obvious to me that Impression was exactly what I was looking for - a small, Nottingham-based digital marketing agency. Aaron must have thought that I’d be a pretty good fit for them in turn, as after another meeting, this time in Impression’s office, he gave me the opportunity to start working one day a week with them the following term.

In January 2016 my internship with Impression began. I was teamed up with one of the account managers, who would be responsible for the majority of my training and for assigning me tasks to do. It was a steep learning curve for me, as I had never done SEO (search engine optimisation) before, and now I was working on real companies! I think the big thing about working for an agency, that I learned very quickly, is that what you do over the course of the day can affect a number of different businesses, and you’re accountable to those clients as well as to the people around you in the workplace.

Despite having a lot to learn, I really enjoyed starting with Impression. One thing that they have always been very good at is playing to my strengths. I’m an English graduate and a blogger, so I’m used to writing on all sorts of topics and producing content pretty quickly, so I’ve always been given lots of article writing tasks at Impression. Knowing that your skills are recognised is a big boost early in your career, as I was able to feel like I was actually bringing something to the company, even though I was only in for one day a week.

Alongside the article writing I was also given more training in the areas that I don’t already have the skills for, such as the more technical side of SEO that focuses on clients’ websites. Some of this involves more writing, but other aspects of it involve having to learn which elements of a web page are important for SEO, and what we can do to improve on them.

And now, 8 months on from starting the internship, I’m still working at Impression. I graduated back in July, and have now moved on to a permanent role. I work three days a week, as I’m about to start a voluntary internship-type year at Trent Vineyard church in Nottingham which will take up the other two days. I didn’t take a year out before uni, so I’m keen to do something a bit different, but Impression have been fantastic in making it possible for me to make a great start to my career at the same time.

I know that after all of my experiences from the past year, my single biggest piece of advice for students looking for jobs and internships is to look beyond the obvious paths. A lot of people I know just applied for grad schemes and nothing else. If you really want to do a grad scheme, that’s great, but a lot of people are applying for them because they’re the obvious route to go down.

My time at smaller companies has shown me how brilliant it can be to work somewhere where you’re going to be given a variety of responsibilities, and where everyone knows who you are and what you can do. A city like Nottingham is a great place to find that sort of business, but you need to get out there and start talking to people, or the opportunities will pass you by.