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Digital, IT and Cyber Security

Digital, IT and cyber security careers cover a huge range of different roles in IT companies and all other employment sectors, including finance and consultancy, public sector, retail, manufacturing, telecommunications, games and apps development. 

While some of these roles will demand technical skills, others may not require a technical degree, so you will need to research roles carefully.

Find out about digital, IT and cyber security

Key resources

Research the sector and keep up with current issues by reading:

Umbrella organisations and professional bodies

Media and games industries

Cyber security

AI

What skills do I need?

Key skills for work in this sector are likely to include the following (depending on the role):

Technical skills

  • Knowledge of programming languages (eg C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, Python, HTML)
  • Knowledge of databases (eg SQL, Oracle)
  • Knowledge of operating systems (eg UNIX)

Personal attributes

  • Technical aptitude (ability to learn new programme languages quickly)
  • Communication skills - oral and written
  • Career motivation
  • Commercial awareness
  • Client skills (communication, influence, negotiation)
  • Organisation and planning
  • Adaptability, coping with change
  • self management
  • project management
  • attention to detail
  • methodical approach

TARGETjobs has a useful article on demonstrating the soft skills needed for IT jobs.

For more information about professional skills and how to develop them, see the York Strengths Professional Skills page.

Work experience

Work experience is invaluable to help you secure your first graduate job (a summer internship may lead to a graduate job with the same employer). Increasingly, employers are offering summer insight programmes and work experience to students after just one year at university, as well as the more traditional summer internships for penultimate-year students, it's never too soon to start looking!

  • Internships and placements
  • An internship with York Internships offers great experience through a summer (or occasionally term-time) project; some are based in University departments
  • Target Jobs website has a list of companies offering IT insight programmes and internships
  • Gradcracker advertise internships, placements and graduate jobs; you can upload your CV and register for alerts
  • UK Technology Tracker can help you keep track of technology recruitment programmes
  • The Step Programme offers a range of paid work experience and internships

Volunteering can offer you opportunities to develop a range of skills, such as teamwork, communication, project management, and demonstrates your commitment and values.

Find jobs

Initial roles in the industry may be in software development, but if you can demonstrate that you are quick to learn about service management or cyber security, you will find more highly paid and influential roles opening up to you.

The following sites may be useful in looking for vacancies:

Games development

Cyber security

AI

Find out more about applying for jobs.

What can I do at York?

Use your time at York to develop your skills and experience to help you get a job in this sector. You could:

  • Talk to people working in the sector - attend relevant networking and employer events, and make contacts through LinkedIn too
  • Get involved with the tech community - look out for hackathons, competitions and games development, locally or online (eg ludum dare). For game developers, build on your skills by using free frameworks, such as Unity
  • Join a student society, such as HackSoc or ShockSoc or SWEY (Supporting Women in Engineering at York)
  • Learn to code, or enhance existing skills. There are several accessible and free platforms such as Codecademy, freeCodeCamp and Coursera among others
  • Consider taking an online course or MOOC to help develop key skills, such as project management or to enhance your digital skills and knowledge.
More resources: people to follow, podcasts, blogs

Connect with York graduates

Join York for Life to connect with our global network of alumni. Start building your own network - find people from your course, look at different careers, ask questions and request a mentor.

Use LinkedIn to make connections, follow organisations of interest, and find out what York graduates are doing. Find out more about using LinkedIn and networking.

Podcasts

Relevant episodes of our What do you actually do? podcast

Practice interviews

You can use Shortlist.Me to prepare for job interviews. Try these interviews with employers working in digital, IT and cyber security:

Find out more about interview prep on the Apply for jobs pages.