Case studies : Graduate customer support/services engineer, Ericsson: Aftab

Aftab graduated from National University in Islamabad, Pakistan with a BSc in telecommunication engineering. He continued his study with an MSc in communications engineering at the University of Manchester. Aftab now works for Ericsson.

I graduated from National University in Islamabad, Pakistan in 2006 with a BSc in telecommunication engineering. I was the first batch of ‘telecommers’ in my university, as the year I completed the course was the first year the university had offered that subject. I had a feeling that this might have caused a problem if I looked for work straight after my degree. In Pakistan employers place a lot of value on the reputation of your course and employers wouldn’t have been aware of my university because it hadn’t offered telecoms courses before.

I decided to do an MSc in the UK and decided on communications engineering at the University of Manchester. I had always wanted to study to masters level anyway and felt it would be easiest to do it straight after my degree, as I felt I might not have chance to do this once I was in work. Knowing I could complete a MSc in the UK in just one year, was perhaps one of the biggest attractions for me as I knew just one more year of studies would help me enter professional life for good. In Pakistan it takes much longer.

When I had completed my MSc I decided to apply for jobs in the UK. As I was an international student, the only way I could get a job here was to find an employer who was willing to apply for a work permit on my behalf. I found that only huge multinational companies were willing to apply for my work permit. All the students in my class were international students (there was only one European student) and they were naturally targeting the same companies. I imagine that international students from other courses across the UK would also be applying for these jobs.

I applied for loads of different types of jobs and got called for final interviews with Ofcom and HSBC. I also got interviewed by Siemens and some smaller telcommunications companies. Many of the companies had the masters as their minimum requirement.

I started to realise after a while that the job market in the UK is very different from Pakistan. In Pakistan the focus is on your technical competency and your academic record - your performance at university is closely scrutinised - whereas in the UK they see who amongst the applicants can best fit their team. When I attended interviews in the UK I found they focused on personality and just trusted university transcripts for my technical competencies. I found it really competitive as there were a lot of people going for each job and the application procedures had quite a few stages.

I found that the more interviews and assessment centres I attended, the more I learnt and the better my performance was. Just when I was confident that I knew how to impress the assessors, I was offered a place with Ericsson UK which I gladly accepted.