Being a student did give me perks — student discounts, bus fare discounts, railcard, you name it. But still, like any other students, I need additional money to fulfil my wish lists, mostly travels. The only way I could top up my savings was by taking paid jobs.
But to be honest, the reason why I wanted to take a part-time/internship/temporary/full-time job in the UK was to expand my experiences and get exposure working abroad.
Now, before starting the job finding process, there are two important things to note. First, as a master student in the UK, under tier 4 student visa, a student is allowed to take work a maximum of 20 hours per week during the term time. It means, when your term is finished (check your LOA), you could take full-time jobs (40 hours/week) provided that you have finished the whole course. And second, the UK has a minimum wage per hour depending on employees’ age. All employers and job agencies should follow this regulation and usually, they are really strict about this. These two important things can be your guide when finding jobs, for example, I don’t recommend applying jobs that way under minimum wage neither forcing you to work beyond the regulation.
Btw, all workers above 16 years old and earning above £183 a week should have a National Insurance (NI) number to pay the income tax. To obtain this, you have to call and create an appointment in the local office. You should come by yourself and bring the documents needed. The NI will be done in 2-4 weeks after the appointment. As far as I know, you could take work while your NI is still in the process. But, there are agencies and employers who don’t accept candidates if they don’t have NI. Better check with them first.
During my time in the UK, I took a part-time job (Student Ambassador of WMG), some casual jobs (paid per hour) and a contract-based/full-time job (Marketing at Monergie). I believe I have something to share for you who wish to get a (paid) job in the UK.
I’ll start with which sites I used to get exposed to the vacancies.
Unitemps was my first and default source to look up temporary jobs. As I understood, Unitemps is founded by Warwick University Enterprise, so basically my campus is the pot of temporary jobs for Warwick Uni students. How about other universities and other cities? Worry not, Unitemps has A LOT of campus branches, where they post temporary jobs specifically located on that campus. Or jobs posted by clients located in a nearby city.
Unitemps provides part-time jobs, casual jobs (paid per hours) and sometimes full-time jobs. My very first part-time job, the student ambassador of WMG, was made through Unitemps. The contract period was a year and I need to work for 10 hours per month. Every month, in Unitemps’ dashboard, I need to make a report how many hours I have fulfilled and subject to my employer’s approval, they will calculate my salary and transfer to my bank account. They also send payslip directly to my house.
Through Unitemps, I also took other casual jobs and I got paid by hours. Stewardess for Campus’ Family Day, checked. WMG’s photoshoot for a marketing brochure, checked. Campus tour leader, checked. Room quality annual surveyor, checked. And by becoming WMG Student Ambassador, I also got the opportunity to become “the face” of Warwick’ postgrad website this year (note: this was a voluntary event!)
2. Campus Job Portal
Besides Unitemps, the campus job portal is also legit. In Warwick University, My Advantage is really useful for Warwick Uni students who wish to have an internship, summer school or full-time jobs. There are a lot of Graduate Program (similar to Management Trainee) available for students. Even better, Warwick Uni provides experienced counsellors that help students to whatever they need in getting jobs — CV feedback, interview exercises, professional branding, or general advice for employment.
I found my first job after the course term is over through My Advantage. The counsellor was really helpful giving feedback on how I should polish my cover letter.
I was really curious with UK startups and it’s been decided that I would only work for startups. Besides, it would be really nice if I could apply my study, innovation and entrepreneurship in the startups. If you’re into startups, you need to check work in startups website. They have abundant of start-up vacancies, full-time to an internship, from England to Scotland. I discovered Monergie from this website.
Don’t forget to try AngelList as well.
4. LinkedIn
Yeps. LinkedIn is really powerful tool to find jobs in the UK. Companies and recruiters do leverage LinkedIn a lot and you should too. Use the filter feature and sort the jobs by industry, locations, fields, and types. If you could subscribe to their premium plan it would be great but I know it’s an expensive one. What I did was activating LinkedIn’ free trial (only a month) and maximise that period to apply and contacts people as many as I can. I did that when I finished my dissertation so I could focus on find jobs.
Try Indeed too!
Are you okay with casual, blue-collar jobs? Use this site:
This is a really cool app for hospitality roles such as baristas, front-team, stewardess, cashiers or chefs. A lot of students use Syft to get additional money. First thing first, you need to get verified by coming to their onboarding session. There, they will check your documents (passport and visa) and give you the basic trainings. Depending on your experiences, you could get verified for kitchen roles, such as chef. But for those who don’t have experiences like me, you would be okay for general-staff role as a starter.
One thing I like about Syft is flexibility. You work based on your availability. Usually, they advertise the job a week or two before the starting date. If you’re up to the job (ensure you read the job description, the location and the uniform), you can claim the shift. After that, on D-1, you need to confirm again. On a working day, you need to clock-in/out. They will send you the salary 2 weeks after your working days. You can do all of these processes (except the onboarding part) through Syft Apps, which is really helpful!
I did two jobs through Syft. First, I helped to prepare drinks in Mike Gallagher’s concert (yes, it was my first time mixing spirits). Second, I helped to prepare the Christmas dinner party in a hotel in Coventry. I learned a lot through this job, seriously.
Syft claims to be the only agency that provides the highest rate/hr among other temporary jobs agencies. I guess it’s true. Although I was new, my first-rate was £9.50 per hour, while the minimum rate per hour was £8.21 per hour at that time (2019). Even during Christmas season, the rate can increase to £12 per hour. But, all workers need to maintain their rate (the average rate was 4.7 and above) by coming on time, not making mistakes, and performing well.
Get additional pocket money to buy more coffees?
SONA
Okay, SONA is not a job portal neither an agency. It’s a campus-based portal where you could participate in students’ experiment and you’ll get paid. They have a lot of experiments and each has different tasks and rate. Usually, the payment is around 5-15 GBP per experiment. I think a lot of UK campuses utilise SONA to find experiments’ participants.
When it’s the season of data gathering (usually around May-June), there are a lot of experiments where you could register and be a participant. I like SONA because I get a chance to know about social experiments conducted in the campus. Bear in mind, please participate the experiments seriously because it is someone else’s hard work 🙂
[Added] My IAE course leader, Jay Bal added one recommended micro jobs crowdsourcing marketplace, called Amazon Mechanical Turk, where a wide range of jobs such as simple data validation, survey participation, content moderation are gathered in this site. This is the place where businesses need resource and individuals need micro tasks meet! I haven’t tried this one though, but according to Jay, her sister make £100-200 per month doing surveys. You should give a try! Thanks, Jay Bal!
I hope this information could be useful for you who wish to get paid jobs in the UK! There are other things I’d like to share, such as cover letter, interviews, or general tips. I promise I’ll share it in the next post.
Stay safe and be healthy always!
laurensia.saraswati 