Grads: Using Retail/Hospitality Experience to Land Your First Graduate Job

Overview

Only have experience in retail or hospitality? Discover how to use it to land a graduate-level role.

Join the Graduate Employability Support Team for a series of online workshops on communicating your value in your graduate career. Your talent and ideas matter, but in today’s competitive UK creative industries, how you communicate your value can be just as important as the work you produce.

Each session focuses on practical tools, real-world examples, and self-reflective activities tailored specifically to the realities of creative graduate careers in the UK.
________

Event Details:Using Retail and Hospitality Experience to Land Your First Graduate Job

🗓 Date: Thurs 5 Feb

🕒 Time:11am – 12pm GMT

📍 Where:Online, Blackboard Collaborate

Presenter:The Graduate Employability Support Team help you identify your skills and strengths sought after in the world of work. We help you explore your career values and take the first steps in your graduate career journey.

🌠 About the Workshop 🌠

If you’ve worked in retail or hospitality while studying, you already have valuable experience for your first graduate job — even if it doesn’t feel directly related to your creative career.

This workshop helps you recognise the transferable skills gained through customer-facing roles and learn how to articulate them clearly and confidently to employers. You’ll explore how to translate everyday responsibilities into professional, employer-focused language for CVs, applications, and interviews.

In this session, we will:

• Identify the transferable skills developed through retail and hospitality work
• Understand how these skills align with graduate and entry-level creative roles
• Learn how to describe your experience clearly on CVs, applications, and in interviews
• Practise articulating your skills using employer-focused language
• Build confidence in presenting your experience as relevant and professional

The aim is to equip creative graduates with the mindset, language and practical strategies to articulate their value to employers for accessing opportunities not publicly advertised in the UK job market.

🎓 Who is this session for? 🎓

This event is open to final years and recent graduates from UAL.This series is designed to help you build the language and confidence to be understood and valued, for those looking to talk more confidently about their skills, experience, or creative identity to find opportunities in creative industries and beyond.

________

Communicating your value in your graduate career- check the agenda for more sessions in the series, and start turning your creative potential into professional momentum.

This workshop series is designed to help you confidently articulate who you are, what you offer, and why it matters, across different aspects of your graduate career journey. Developing language, clarity, and self-belief as an early-career professional is a process and life-long skillset that will help you develop a sharper competitive edge in your intention-driven job search. From accessing the hidden job market to succeeding in interviews, your ability to clearly express your value, potential, impact, and career goals is a critical employability skill that underpins creative career success.

Image credit: Creative Business by Daniel Ioannou