I am keen to pursue self-employment, freelancing or running my own business after my studies

Self-employment, freelancing and running your own business

Mycareer Digital Resources has a range of useful resources when considering self-employment. If you are keen to pursue self-employment after your studies these short films and articles are particularly useful:

Develop your self-awareness by undertaking assessments:

In order to succeed it is vital that you understand the way you work, your strengths, weaknesses, tendencies and preferences.

Relevant programmes and events:

The Cube: business start-up, self-employment and freelancing, weekly drop-in, workshops, monthly support sessions and more

If you are keen to pursue self-employment and/or you have a business idea, The Cube offers weekly opportunities for students and graduates to access information on a variety of free self-employment and business start-up support all in one place. This includes:

bespoke expert-run workshops and events
1:1 business and self-employment support appointments
1:1 business expert appointments on HR, legal, finance, intellectual property and more
weekly drop-in sessions
support to access Santander funding
Professional Entrepreneurial Mentoring Programme
business challenges and competitions
networking opportunities.

To find out which services may be most appropriate to you, simply email thecube@plymouth.ac.uk

The Cube also delivers an ongoing programme of business start-up and development workshops on a variety of topics including:

goal setting
branding yourself and your business
networking
rapport building and negotiation
podcasting, vlogging & TikToks for business
video production and editing
costing and pricing.

View graduate video case studies

Techstars Startup weekends

Available to students, graduates and members of the general public, the Techstars Startup Weekends are the place to meet like-minded, entrepreneurial individuals and be immersed in a weekend of creativity and collaboration. The most recent event involved around 50 participants, which included industry coaches, judges and the attendees themselves. It resulted in seven teams working full-time over the course of the weekend to build a start-up from scratch. With just 54 hours, Friday saw participants pitching ideas, before voting on which ones to take forward and forming teams to work together over the weekend.

Two full days followed, with teams living and breathing their startup ideas as they worked together, ate together and received fantastic support from expert coaches. The weekend culminated in teams presenting their businesses to a panel of judges on Sunday, before the awards were given and everyone celebrated with a final meal and drink together.

These events are designed to help support and encourage budding entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs or anyone with exciting ideas for new products, processes, services or experiences. For those that do not have an idea to pitch, startup weekends are still a great opportunity to learn more about what goes into building a startup and making your ideas a reality.

Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTP’s) for graduates

A Knowledge Transfer Partnership is a partnership between a business seeking expertise, an academic institution (such as University of Plymouth) and a recently qualified graduate/postgraduate, who is known as a KTP Associate.

The Associate is supervised to work on a specific project, which facilitates innovation, wealth creation and helps to embed new capability within that business.

Knowledge Transfer Partnerships are one of the UK’s largest graduate employment programmes. Upon successful appointment, the KTP Associate is employed by University of Plymouth (between 12–36 months) but works within the business to deliver an agreed project plan. Along with providing you with a fantastic platform to launch your commercial career, you can apply the skills you gained to successfully work as a freelancer or set up your own business.