Pumping Up Career Muscle: What ICEF Career Services has in store for students

© iStock

ICEF Career Services introduces students to the industry and helps them to land jobs by organizing dozens of career guidance events every year. Its team maintains partnership relations with flagship leaders in a variety of fields including, among others, consulting, FMCG, banking, startups, and IT. In this review, we bring you up to date on how career guidance works, what careers ICEF graduates pursue abroad, and why ICEF Career Services will be taking students to companies.

Learning job search strategies

A top university is expected to provide its students not only with education, but also ability to apply it. For this purpose, university offices operate career services with “degree programmes” in employment and job search, that run in parallel with core curricula. ICEF Career Services is designed to teach students how to approach career planning in a competent and structured manner through enhanced competitiveness in the global labor market and further education opportunities. So how does it work?

In fact, career services offices operate like giant help desks or gyms where undergraduate and graduate students come for comprehensive exercise before entering the labor market. Their activities are grouped into portfolios with exercises as diverse as technicalities of CV writing, interviewing, getting in touch with employers, choosing career path, and asking the question “is this job right for me?” Victoria Pralich, head of ICEF Career Services, says her team are treating careers as living organisms, working to pump up each student’s career muscle. If a student starts planning their career path as yearly as the first year of study, he or she stands a good chance of landing the internship with their dream company before they approach their third year – because they know what motivates their choice, are aware of the prospects and are more in control of job search.

Internships were undertaken by approximately 300 students in 2021. Compared to the previous academic year, the number of those who interned with the Big Three has increased two-fold. This trend hold true also for the top banks including SBER, Raiffeisenbank and the Bank of Russia.

Every student is, of course, free to explore the labour market on their own. But, as with Microeconomics, for which there exists a syllabus, you cannot expect your career muscle to become strong without attentive, continual care. “Our task is to help students to avoid making silly mistakes at the start of their career, that can damage their relationship with employers,” says Victoria Pralich.

For this purpose, the career guidance techniques are being streamlined. The series of webinars scattered throughout the academic year now forms part of the course titled  “First Step”. Consisting of four modules, the course offers exercises to test students’ ability to get in touch with their potential employers, write CVs, pass interviews and generally make themselves visible to the labor market. First Step has as primary purpose to teach students how to overcome psychological barriers and boost self-confidence in the workplace. 

Meeting the best of the best

“Moving learning online has posed extra challenges on the one hand, and generated opportunities on the other. We are now able to organize events on any topic our students take interest in, and within a very short time,” says the head of ICEF Career Services. Over the past two years, the number of our career guidance events has increased more than two-fold. The task is to connect the students to the labor market by arranging meetings with employers – the large Russian and international companies. They always welcome the opportunity to meet the students of ICEF as their potential candidates. 

Top employers know ICEF as a reputable school. They keep themselves updated on graduates’ career progress and view hires from among the ICEF students as an asset 

In cooperating with the industry, the Career Services seeks to maintain continuous contact with the top 10 businesses. That being said, its website welcomes vacancies from all employers. Some of the activities, particularly the exclusive mock interviews and one to one meetings, involve solely the leading businesses. 

Welcoming new prospects

In 2021, ICEF Career Services intentionally stepped away from the activities that are limited to only company presentations. With public access to webpages with lots of  presentation materials and students exploring potential employers mostly online, there has been a shift in focus towards interactive events – workshops and master classes on consulting and investment banking project management – that use, among other techniques, case debriefing for students to see where the experts might have erred in their decision-making.

Unlike in 2020, there have been 9 graduates who chose to start IT and fintech startups in 2021.

Also, practice interviews have been started in the form of speed dating for a job, where candidates are given feedback right after the interview. Actively contributing to these speed interviews last year were KPNG and Moody’s. One more line of activities involves thematic lectures, delivered to students by different industries. The second half of 2022 will see a series of business simulation games, a format co-initiated by Citibank. 

ICEF Career Services is working to provide students with as deep industry immersion as possible by introducing them to a diverse range of potential career fields. For example, activities are currently underway to provide a good working knowledge of FMCG sector: progress and prospects have so far been presented to ICEF students by the management of Procter & Gamble. The students now feel more confident that they will be able to use their finance and economics background in sectors such as marketing, procurement, IT, among others. 

The plan for next year is to focus career events around industry sectors, not particular businesses. There will be meetings with Johnson & Johnson divisions managers. Designed to introduce students to the ins and outs of the pharmaceutical industry, their hosts will present J&J’s core units. And since J&J is leading the response to the global pandemic, issues such as pharmaceutical economics, production and pricing can be expected to raise special interest among students. 

“Another novel format we will soon be testing is taking groups of students to companies for live interviews and live broadcasting for those who may not be able to be there due to Covid restrictions. One company to serve as our “testing ground” is Ozon Fintech – the employer to some of ICEF graduates. We are going to visit it as early as March,” said Victoria Pralich.

Getting to know the world

In assisting students in study opportunities and job search abroad, the Career Services relies on its communication with alumni. This year, the “university experience” talks evolved into the “area description” sessions, involving the alumni and students to share their experience of life and work in France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany and UK. The speakers gave a lot of details of the many sides of life abroad, especially regarding employment and what relates to visa arrangements, market, business culture and everything there is to know about making a smooth start in another country. For example, students considering employment in Switzerland as quants have learned more about Swiss employers’ expectations and why quantitate finance is a popular career choice in Switzerland.

Nearly 60% of the undergraduate class of 2021 found employment in companies such as Sber, Citibank, Tinkoffbank, McKinsey, Deloitte, KPMG, UBS, Raiffeisenbank. The two major tech companies with ICEF graduates onboard their Business Analytics, Data Science and Product Management teams, are Yandex and Ozon.

Twice a year, ICEF Career Services delivers a two-part course on how to apply to universities worldwide. Part One are webinars on degree selection strategies; Part Two involves the preparation of documents package and is followed by individual guidance. 

Nothing to worry about

“Since employers keep up regularly updated on their performance, we can safely say that the labor market is in good standing and there is nothing for our students to worry about,” said Victoria Pralich. The trends seem to be stable over the past few years, with technification and automation penetrating more and more processes and requiring modern finance specialists, especially in the investment field, to learn programming. Alongside with the core curricula, ICEF offers a wide array of electives in programming languages, Excel management, machine learning, project-based thinking, etc. – the skills to include on a resume to complement the essential competencies required for a successful career start. 

Christina Drozd, ICEF second-year undergraduate

I know it from my own and the experience of my friends that ICEF Career Services office is one of the best for students. It uses its channels to post job vacancies, many of which are perfect fit for students because they don’t require previous experience, as is often the case with the job ads you come across elsewhere.

The vacancies the Career Services selects for the students the realtime job offers.

Next 

I am very pleased with the events the Career Services is organizing – meetings with companies, alumni, hiring managers. It’s important to know what to expect in a workplace and which requirements candidates are expected to meet. Job seekers need to get absolutely focused on the company they want to join and where they fit. Many of the job vacancies I see posted on ICEF Career Services webpage come from the alumni. I am very glad that we, students, have access to the “primary sources” and are the first to be told about the opportunities unavailable to many.

I've long wanted to try consulting. So, when I learned there was an internship offer from BCG, I thought it might be a great opportunity to see if my perceptions of the industry matched reality. I used all the resources, including those of ICEF Career Services, to prepare myself and I won that internship – through a lengthy selection process which involved as many as five stages because of the growing influx of internship applications that BCG enjoys every year.

For me as an internship seeker, the core criterion of an ideal internship was thorough work immersion. My goal was to fully experience the consultant role, not the involvement in one-off projects. The internship lasts ten weeks, which I think is the appropriate duration to get the feel of how consulting works in the Big Three companies.

The thing I particularly like about consulting job is problem-solving strategies. It takes all your skills – research capacity, analytical thinking, communication skills – to achieve a good result.  

You need to keep yourself in good shape and use teamwork as a way to gain a multifaceted view. And what I also find interesting is that you never know where you end up in consulting as it is a field with no clear boundaries and lot of freedom for maneuver. Even though I am an intern, my colleagues treat me as an equal, giving me opportunities to achieve my full potential. All this helps to understand if consulting is the right career for me.