A first versus work experience: would you rather?

As I approach the end of my degree, this is a topical debate. Is it best to pour your efforts fully into your academic studies or to balance them with the relevant work experience?

I guess, to an extent, is it career path dependent. For example, with a history degree, most work experience is directly irrelevant to your degree. Yet with a law degree, the entire legal sector revolves around vacation schemes and mini-pupillages.

Focusing on the legal sector, being a law student myself, the choice is obvious. Unless you have powerful contacts or a Daddy as a Judge, you are going to struggle without work experience. Yes, a blinding first class degree will get you an interview but the skills you learn from the work experience will get you through the interview and the vacation scheme.

Companies want personality and, more than ever, they are drumming this message through their graduate recruiters. They all want someone different, “out there” and who, ultimately, can small talk potential clients into becoming new clients. This ‘skill’ of personality is inherent but practicing your personality on the office junior and the manager of the company you’re-not-interested-in-but-needed-it-on-you-CV can really teach you when certain jokes are appropriate and.. well, just are not. All of these things may help your interview and meet-and-greet technique when it comes down to an important graduate job.

And work experience can mean WORK experience. Important life skills learnt from the mundane and tedious waitress position in the empty, beach-side café can really help. That time when the picky family complained about their £6.99 (shop bought) pizza HAS taught you something in life which you can utilise in everyday, graduate life.

And, of course, the university from which you attained your degree is important too. Many universities lower in the tables add an extra year in industry to their degrees because they are aware firms will be more interested in a 2:1 from Cambridge than a 2:1 from, say, Derby. This reinforces the importance and weight of work experience accompanying a degree.

And now, back to that matter of a first. YES, aim for that first. And YES, by all means, work your socks off trying to achieve it as, ultimately, you are more employable with a first than a 2:1. But, don’t dismiss any work experience opportunity as unhelpful or below you as you never know how it can help or which blank interview question it may fill.