Careers Advice and Guidance

At City and Islington College, we offer an impartial careers advice and guidance service via drop-ins, booked appointments, telephone and email. Our highly experienced and qualified team will give you comprehensive and up-to-date careers information. The service has its own dedicated suite for 1:1 meetings and also group enrichment/projects that will look fantastic on any supporting statement to university, an apprenticeship or employment.

Every year we run high quality enrichment programmes such as the Lloyds Junior Scholars with Lloyds Banking Group, Legal Action including Herbert Smith Freehills and UCL Ambassadors, Get Ahead in TV with Curve Media. We also run projects such as the Games Design challenge bringing together a panel of game design experts.

We have a yearly plan of careers and employability activities so that you can get the most from your time at CANDI. The services and activities are planned to meet the Gatsby Benchmarks of good careers guidance and we also take your feedback on services to continuously improve our service to you.

Our advisers will be here with you through every step of your journey with us, from application to results day.

We can help you if you are:

Unsure or confused about your career or course choices
At risk of leaving your course early

Worried that you will not succeed on your course

Unsure whether you are on the right course

Confused about your future choices and opportunities

If you are a Looked After Child, we guarantee you three appointments throughout the year to explore your next steps and create action plans.

Find out more on how our careers service helped A Level student, Lale Hanalp gain new skills and boost her prospects in our article here.

WHAT WE OFFER…

Impartial careers advice
We offer individual advice about your specific career options and next steps

Careers information
We can talk to you about university, apprenticeships, other training routes and how to apply (including UCAS, CUKAS, GTTR and PA), as well as giving you access to online databases such as Kudos, Adult Directions and Exodus

Employability skills
We help you learn transferrable and industry-specific skills for the workplace, as well as how to create job applications that will make you stand out

Opportunities to network
We run workshops, events, one-to-one meetings, through your course or by connecting with you directly

Work experience
We also support many work experience placements at CANDI, from finding you a placement and preparing you before you go, to supporting you on the placement and helping you identify the skills you’re gaining along the way

Each year we run campus and cross college Higher Education fairs with over 40 universities in attendance, as well as other national events throughout the year such as Science Week, Apprenticeship Week, Careers Week, ongoing talks with Creative Mentor Network for our creative students, all supported by employers, universities, and other organisations. Much of our events throughout the year support is also recorded on our CANDI Careers YouTube channel so that you can get a taste of the vast offer we have for our student population no matter what course they are on.

We advise teaching staff on developing careers education and planning activities in their courses to help enhance employability and confidence with career planning. We also actively source and advertise mentoring schemes to support disadvantaged students seeking progression into employment, training or education. We are also part of the National Career Ready programme where students are mentored by leading business figures. Our students have had some outstanding summer internships at prestigious companies such as Citi Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland and Marsh LTD. We provide many Mentoring opportunities to stretch and support such as Zero Gravity, Realizing Opportunities, Brightside, Social Mobility Foundation and the Local Village Network

Our careers lead is Philippa Cooke, philippa.cooke@candi.ac.uk, 0207 520 7360