Life Launch
Helping you get a head start in life
Careers advice from the business world: proactive student career development
Finding the right path in life is as essential as it is challenging
Possibly the greatest gift you can have in life is to know what jobs might give you joy, what career paths can deliver you happiness and success, and what occupations will fill you with excitement because you love doing them.
Many young people feel that the careers advice they experience at school or university fails them. We are a team of business experts drawn from the FTSE boardrooms and some of the best headhunting firms and graduate recruiters in the business, and we’re here to make sure you are given what you need to make a head start in life.
If you’re reading this you are probably either:
- a school student wondering what on earth you should do academically to choose the right path in life;
- a university or college student who has:
- studied a ‘generic’ subject and is unsure which career path might now be best for you,
- or a career-specific one that hasn’t been as successful or as exciting as you had hoped, or;
- a parent wondering what on earth you should give by way of advice to your child.
If you’re unsure of which career path would best suit you in life, and you’d like to know, then we can help, and help in a way that we believe no other career advice service can equal.
You're not alone
If this lack of certainty is something keeping you up at night, then you’re in very good company. Research indicates most other students and parents feel exactly the same.
A recent Ofsted report found that of 40 schools investigated, only 4 were providing adequate careers advice. Universities fare little better when it comes to providing their students with an adequate launchpad to career fulfilment.
The parental dilemma
According to a recent report from Big Four firm EY, the first port of call for students to ask for help with their future career options is to their parents, with only 17% opting for their career advisors. It also revealed that over half of parents giving this advice said they didn’t fully understand the long-term implications of such options for their children’s careers.
Wanting informed advice and feeling unable to either get it or give it takes its toll. As half of parents also considered such career decisions to be more stressful than moving home or changing job, it’s hardly surprising it feels like a daunting prospect.
Heather's recommendation
"After finishing university, it's easy to find yourself lost in job applications and panicking about what to do with your life. After finishing my undergraduate degree, I was lucky enough to find Chris at Elliott Armstrong who took me through this incredible profiling method.
As well as being able to dispense extremely sage life advice, Chris was able to help me prioritise the things that I needed, and clarify the things that I wanted, from a workplace. Armed with solid life advice and a stronger insight into myself, I was lucky enough to secure job offers for graduate schemes at Nestle, the Civil Service, and KPMG - the last of which I took and greatly enjoyed.
I have no doubt that the guidance I received helped me as a recent graduate and will continue to benefit me throughout my working life. Chris Elliott and Life Launch come highly recommended."
Chris Elliott and Life Launch come highly recommended.
The cost of getting it wrong
Picking the wrong career path can be much more damaging than doing nothing at all. Trying to undo what you've done can lead to a life of unfulfilled potential and disappointment, rather than choosing a future at the start that allows you to become the best and the happiest you can be.
Not getting it right also has financial consequences. The higher education landscape in the UK can see students graduating from a three-year degree with up to £53,000 worth of debt. And as parents worry about their child’s degree choice, and with nearly 80% concerned that their children will struggle to find employment on graduation, finding the right career path and choosing an appropriate degree has never been more important.
Many argue it is too big a choice to place upon the shoulders of 17 or a 21-year-old. As has always been the case with any graduate generation, the vast majority of students don’t really know what they want to do in life when they finish university, let alone school.
Too frequently they end up on the wrong career path, as evidenced by the increasing amount of young people in their twenties experiencing the new phenomenon of “quarter-life crises”, or drop out of their courses because they find their heart just isn’t in the subject they thought they’d be inspired by.
If you also consider that in our ever more rapidly changing world many of today's students will finish their working lives having done jobs that haven’t yet been invented, then understanding
- the underlying fundamentals of their character,
- what drives them
- and also what might hold them back
becomes incredibly important.
Young people today face unprecedented challenges
There is an old adage that “things aren’t what they used to be” and it’s true, but not in the way you might think.
Previous generations could afford a lackadaisical/ laid-back attitude in the era of full grants and a less competitive job market, and could enjoy the privilege of working it out as they went along.
Today this is a luxury that the current generation (and any parents who may be paying for their tuition) can ill-afford, financially or otherwise. Especially as the advice often given is that pupils should choose degree subjects that most immediately interest them, without much thought as to figuring out what the right career path is for them and whether such a degree choice would put them on it.
You might, for example, love English Literature, and therefore guess the obvious choice might be English, which can be a very useful degree. However, your Life Launch plan might indicate a career path that might benefit from another, less obvious, single or joint honours course - one that might also fascinate whilst at the same time better position you for your future career.
In most cases, neither school pupils nor graduates should be expected to make such huge decisions so early on in their lives. At this age we’re still discovering ourselves and our abilities, and we often just don’t know ourselves as well as we need to do in order to make such life-defining choices.
George's recommendation
"I went through a really tough time at home during my GCSEs, I didn’t get close to the grades I was predicted and I didn’t think I’d be able to succeed at A-Level or get anywhere close to university. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, or how I was going to get there, and life was tough.
I’d done other careers advice things through school, and didn’t really find them of any help, but Life Launch really blew me away. How they could know so much about me was almost scary!
Working with my consultant I got to see what I needed to focus on and what I would enjoy doing both at university and when I got into the job market. With this support and guidance on crafting my UCAS personal statement I got into my first choice Russell Group University, and am now really enjoying my course and optimistic about the future."
So how do you make the right decisions?
It is estimated that 46 per cent of UK employees in the next half century will quit and re-train completely after deciding their career isn't for them.
So what’s the secret to getting it right first time? We believe that it all comes down to self-knowledge.
If you know what your fundamental drivers are - the needs that are hard wired into you and that make you tick - then you can meet those needs and achieve your full potential.
Unaided, most of us don’t discover these unique fundamentals of ourselves until much later in life, if indeed we ever fully discover them at all, which is one hell of a waste of human potential.
That’s why we’ve developed a process that we call Life Launch.
At its base is the most reliable and statistically validated psychometric profiling methodology in existence, one that offers a unique and unrivalled depth and complexity.
Pioneered over 60 years ago, it was originally used for selecting which top graduates would become US Air Force jet fighter pilots, and since that time it was been expanded and improved, a profiling methodology used by some of the most successful corporations in North America, along with many top schools and Ivy League universities. Over 4 million people have benefitted from it, but having been kept an ‘open secret’ in America, it is still largely unheard of in the UK.
The science behind the method
Not all career assessment methodologies are created equal.
An average career assessment analyses a person's interests and matches those interests with a variety of career paths. Necessary, but not sufficient.
A great career assessment analyses not only interests, but also a person's typical behaviour and compares them with the behaviour of a typical person who is satisfied in that career role. Our methodology does this and more.
Over 4 million people have used it, and yet no two profiles have ever been identical. Positive, user friendly and non-judgemental, it details the following:
- your conscious behaviours,
- your fundamental needs. These are often unconscious, and yet are critical to ensuring success in life.
- Your potential stress behaviours and what to do in order minimise their impact or avoid them all together.
- Your interest needs - what you need to focus on to be happy and fulfilled, and what things to avoid lest they make your life miserable (and potentially shorter).
- Your work styles, including your preferred ways of managing and being managed, the kind of business environments and workplace cultures best suited to you, your levels of trust and political ability, the size of organisation that might best suit you, even how your brain is wired for decision making.
Without such a head start, people often take decades to truly understand all of this, finding out by too much trial and rather too many errors. With such self-knowledge, they can enjoy not only a happy and successful path in life, but also enjoy being well ahead of their peers.
Most psychometric profiles are not valid over time, and a number of careers advice companies stop giving advice to people in their mid-twenties. Our method is valid over time, and so confident of this are we that we’ll happily give you advice based on it for years to come.
PJ's recommendation
"Life Launch is absolutely amazing. I can’t tell you how much it has helped me so far.
Getting to see clearly both what I was good at and also what I might need to avoid was really useful, as well as the kind of working environments that would best suit me.
What was probably even more helpful, though, was getting to discover the roots of my personality (some surprises, but it all made sense!) and what I needed to do in order to be happy not only in my work but also my life in general.
My consultant was really lovely, very patient, explained everything perfectly and was able to distill quite complicated and detailed feedback in a way that was easy to get.
They really seem to know the employment market and how careers progress, and what qualification and career path you might need to get you to where you ideally would want to be.
It really gave me the confidence to know where to go and how to get there."
Who will help you, and why you might like them to
We combine this unrivalled ability to know what makes you tick, and what will do so throughout your life, with people who have the practical experience to understand what it takes to excel in life, not only because they’ve done so themselves but also because their job is to understand what top talent looks like and how careers develop in the real world.
We can give you a lot or other advice too, even tell you how to get ahead at university, how to win friends and influence people, and what things you should focus on outside of the classroom to make sure you’re as attractive a candidate for employers as you can be.
With Life Launch consultants and advisors you get the experience of:
- Ex FTSE 100 HR directors and other ExCo Board members.
- Ex Senior Partners & Practice Heads of top global headhunting firms.
- Founders of some of the top graduate recruitment firms in the country.
- Knowledge of the UK, European and Global recruitment marketplace.
- Experts who know from practical experience, rather than merely courses and theory, what it takes to make it to the boardrooms and top jobs of successful organisations across all industries, to found successful start ups, freelancing and balancing a portfolio career.
The Life Launch team are really senior corporate types - why do they bother doing this?
Every child wants to be happy in life, and every parent wants their child to be happy, and if we can get to enjoy using our skills and experience to help that become a reality, then you won’t be the only person in the process getting job satisfaction.
We also get satisfaction from knowing that this isn't your average process and we’re not your average career advisors.
The Life Launch package
- A free no-obligation Life Launch introduction over the phone to ascertain if it's something you'd like to pursue.
- A bespoke version of an unrivalled behavioural profiling method that has been used for successful career guidance for over 60 years.
- A minimum of two hours in a one-to-one initial session with a consultant, and as many follow up sessions as may be required.
- Additional bespoke advice on how best to excel at university, college and/or entering the job market, including CV/ LinkedIn, networking and interview tips.
- Longer-term strategic career planning – “if I’m here now, how do I get there”.
The inclusive cost of this package is £825 + VAT
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