Careers
At the University of Exeter, we aim to offer as many activities as possible to help broaden your career development and equip you with the skills employers find most valuable. These include employer visits, mooting, pro bono and skills sessions, which provide many opportunities to meet and interact with potential employers.
We benefit from a network of professional contacts locally, nationally and internationally who attend our annual Law Careers Fair. Our extensive alumni network is keen to offer mock interviews, mentoring and work placements to Exeter law students.
A Law degree from the University of Exeter will provide you with a wide range of skills suitable not only for a career as a solicitor or barrister, but also in the wider world of business including finance, administration and commerce. Skills such as assimilation of large amounts of material, commercial awareness, writing concise reports and problem solving, which you will develop during your degree, are vital to a range of graduate recruiters including those in government and general management.
By delivering a curriculum that supports the development of core workplace skills, we encourage students to gain hands-on experience of the job market as an integral aspect of their degree programme.
Through short-term or year-long work placements, the aim is that students will be able to draw on strong evidence of their skills when applying for their first professional roles and become a safe bet in the eyes of graduate employers.
The Law School is committed to delivering a curriculum that blends doctrine with practice and to give its students opportunities to observe or participate in activities involving the application of the law. It is with this in mind that the Law School created Exeter Law Projects (ELP). ELP has many streams of pro bono opportunities and a general appeal for interest is circulated to students in September of each academic year.
Your future employment is at the heart of the law degrees on the Cornwall campus. The combination of law and business will increase your core understanding of commercial awareness, key business skills and legal knowledge which will prepare you for careers or further study across corporate sectors. Both the LLB Law with Business and BBL Bachelor in Business and Laws can be taken with a placement year option in either business or law.
All law degree programmes in Cornwall are underpinned in your first year of study by the Legal Foundations course. You will develop your core practical legal skills throughout this course. You will apply your learning in years two and three with activities such as the law clinic and our placement year in law or business. We work closely with our Industry Advisory Group to ensure the skills we train you in reflect current trends and standards.
A dedicated team of employability consultants will support your career decision making, planning and applications by providing careers advice and guidance, career planning and skills workshops.
Types of activities include:
- Visits to Truro combined court and the opportunity to work on the legal helpdesk.
- Visit to local and national law firms.
- Workshop on preparing for the Law fair and full access to employers via a virtual careers fair platform.
- Workshops on how to become a barrister or solicitor, applying for vacation schemes and training contracts.
- One to one support from a Careers Consultant
- Alternative Careers for Law students’ workshops helping you to consider other sectors where you can use your legal skills.
- Speed networking, panel discussions and presentations with alumni and employers.
We enjoy extremely good relations with members of the legal profession both regionally, nationally and internationally. The Career Zone coordinate an annual Law Fair, attended by many leading law firms who specifically target the University’s graduates.
The fair also provides an opportunity for you to find out more about further graduate study in Law, which in the competitive legal world can give you a chance to expand and deepen your legal knowledge and stand out from the crowd.
Law Fairs are the perfect opportunity to meet and network with prospective employers, ask questions and make an impression. We help students prepare for the fair by hosting a “How to make the most of the Exeter Law Careers fair” workshop.
The Law School is committed to delivering high-quality, tailored careers advice and guidance to help law students make the most of translating the transferrable skills they acquire from the pro bono, extra-curricular and employability opportunities they are involved with. The Law Careers Consultants at Streatham offer individual appointments to Law students to give guidance on application forms, preparing for assessment centres and interviews and to give general careers advice to help with career decision making. First year students benefit from group workshops with the Law Careers Consultants where they learn about law application timelines, how to make the most of visits to or by firms and find out about the variety of things law students can do with their degree.
At Penryn, the Careers Consultant supports students by offering workshops for example Legal CV's, Commercial Awareness, applying for Vacation Schemes/internships and career planning workshops for those considering both law and non-law routes.
To help you navigate through the range of careers in the legal market, we arrange a series of employer and alumni visits and presentations taking a themed weeks approach. The visits allow you the opportunity to hear about different career paths which can help you with your own career decision making process. From commercial city solicitor to human rights charity officer, the speakers range in seniority and experience to give you the broadest view possible of where your law degree will take you and what you need to do to get there. As well as employer visits and the Law Fair, we offer opportunities to network, attend panel discussions with alumni, law specialism talks and practical “how to” workshops.
Employer workshops and presentations will be embedded within modules and also delivered on an extracurricular basis through the Career Zone team. To attend these, you can book a place using the Handshake platform and details can also be found here:
Our emphasis on helping you to develop your employability skills starts right at the beginning of your law degree. The Create Your Future programme (Developing the knowledge, skills and resources to build the career you want) will build on your Legal Foundations module and expand your understanding of graduate level career options including postgraduate study. You will learn about key topics relevant to the modern workplace including entrepreneurial thinking, sustainability, commercial awareness, Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity and the fourth industrial revolution.
With clearly defined activities to enhance your skills and attributes interwoven in much of the law group work, further workshops organised by the Employability Team provide extra practical support for application writing, interviews, assessment centres, commercial awareness and problem solving skills.
During my placement with EDF NNB Legal, I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to gain first-hand experience alongside not only world-class legal professionals but commercial and technical professionals too… To be even a small part of this enormous project is fantastic, and will set you apart from other candidates when applying for vacation schemes and training contracts.
Tom
LLB with Professional Legal Placement (2020). Placement: EDF NNB Legal.
