Following feedback I received from international students that they would like the OU to advertise more international vacancies, I reached out to the Careers and Employability Services to discuss opportunities for international students.
I was informed that the complexity lies in the fact that international OU students live all over the world and study many different subjects. It is therefore very difficult for the Careers and Employability Services to advertise job opportunities in so many different countries for so many different sectors. However, there are some options available to international students.
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1 Prospects
The Prospects website is a good place to do research about working abroad. It can be searched by country.
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2 LinkedIn
Networking can be important. You can use LinkedIn as a tool to research opportunities and to connect to professionals working in areas you are interested in. You can also search fellow OU alumni from your country.
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3 OpportunityHub and Job search tool
This section was written by the OU Careers and Employability Services.
As well as our database OpportunityHub, the Open University also subscribes to a job search tool which allows you to access a far wider range of job and internship opportunities in over 50 countries outside the UK.
This guide looks at how you may be able to get optimum returns using the job search tool when you do searches on opportunities outside the UK. -
4 Job search
First of all, go to https://openuniversity.careercentre.me/jobsearch.
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5 Country
Type in the country you want to search and select the relevant option.
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6 Keywords
Now type in the keywords box, a word or words that best describe the type of job role you are looking for. Then select the option which best matches the type of role you want.
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7 Time period
To maximise the number of opportunities, now click on ‘Advanced’ and then click on the time period and change this to ‘Anytime’.
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8 Find jobs
Now click on ‘Find Jobs’ to generate the vacancies.
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9 Vacancies
You should now see the vacancies generated. You may want to experiment with changing the words in the key word box to generate a better return.
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10 Save your search
You can save individual vacancies, and your search, by clicking on the relevant buttons shown above.
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11 My jobs
You can track viewed, saved and applied for jobs within ‘My jobs’.
Please note when using this tool, that you are being taken to external sources and vacancies which are not subject to the vetting procedures that we use for OU vacancies.
We’d be really interested to hear how you get on with using this search engine and gaining feedback on searching for vacancies in your home country. If you have any feedback you’d like to send us please complete the feedback form at https://msds.open.ac.uk/forms/cesfs1v2/.
You can find further resources on opportunities outside the UK and searching for international jobs and internships here https://help.open.ac.uk/job-seeking/working-abroad-and-international-job-search-resources.
