Making the transition from education to employment can be a big challenge. However, by matching students with professionals who can offer insights into working life and support career decisions, the Hallam Collective helps to bridge this gap.

The Hallam Collective is an online community built exclusively for students, new graduates and alumni (graduates) of Sheffield Hallam University – that’s a community of around 31,000 current students and 250,000 alumni in over 170 countries – all with one thing in common.

Why join?

The Hallam Collective could be the missing piece of the puzzle as you aim to maximise your career success.

By joining, you can build your connections, access networking opportunities and get career-enhancing support through mentoring from alumni who are making waves in their fields and want to help you join them.

The Hallam Collective can help you increase your career capital by:

• expanding your professional contacts
• exploring different career paths
• gaining support on progressing into industry
• undertaking a mentoring partnership
• gaining CV-boosting work experience.

All of this can come together to help you to build professional skills, gain industry insights, make important career decisions and better prepare you for the world of work.

Our mentors say they want to give back to help new graduates and students navigate their way to success. Likewise, mentors also benefit from coaching students by developing transferable skills they can use in the workplace.

How you can get involved

Register with the Hallam Collective now and maximise your career success. Registering typically takes around 5 minutes. 

Mentee experiences

Law graduate Leon Priestley partnered with a criminal defence barrister in London as part of the mentoring scheme during his second year of university. He said:

“Since I was sixteen, I wanted to qualify as a criminal lawyer. I don’t come from a family of lawyers. I am the first person in my family to graduate from university. Having a mentor who does the job I want to do inspired me and gave me more drive and passion to keep going.”

Final year Business and Enterprise Management student Benjamin Summerfield had the following to say about his mentor:

“He’s given me access to different departments at DHL that I would never have had the chance to see otherwise, but the main thing he gave me was confidence. For someone in his position to believe in me and encourage me to ‘go for it’ has been a massive confidence boost.” 

Mentor experiences

Stephen Kenwright is becoming a big name in the digital marketing industry and recently launched Rise at Seven - a digital marketing agency in Sheffield. Amazingly, he’s also found time to help students as a mentor. Stephen said:

“It’s been really interesting to meet people that I think are definitely going to go places. The fact that these students are on a mentoring scheme means that they are much more organised, driven and ambitious than I was at university!”

Jodie Howlett graduated in Mechanical Engineering in 2019 is already embarking on an exciting career at the European Space Agency’s mission control centre. She said:

“I was on the mentoring program as a student and wanted to give something back now that I'm on the other side. I like working with students and hope to help inform them of opportunities they might not otherwise know of.”