A huddle of penguins

The City Penguin Club (CPC) is a community that we established to support students in the transition from university to working life. In particular, the club aims to help with the big step of moving to a new city to start, or look for, a graduate job.

We graduated from the University of Sheffield, two apprehensive post-grads, slightly clueless as to what life as a trainee solicitor was really like and reluctant to let go of uni life as we knew it! We set up the CPC in 2012, six months into our training contracts, having found that our experiences in moving into our graduate jobs were very different to what we had expected. We felt that this was something worth sharing and wanted to find out about other people's experiences.

Specific challenges for us included uprooting our lives from our respective homes and settling into a new job, in a new city, surrounded by completely new people. It was also hard to dive into the world of networking as a solicitor, having realised how difficult the current market is and how important it is to get your name out early on in your career!

To ease the transition for ourselves and for future graduates, we set up the CPC to allow students to interact with each other and talk jobs, socials, new cities and everything in between! Members of our community interact with one and other from their final year of university onwards, sharing their experiences at each stage so they can confidently enter the world of work supported by a group of peers they have already had the chance to get to know. Finding the time to meet people and make new friends at the same time as finding your feet in the workplace is a challenge - CPC means that you can get a headstart and feel more relaxed as you embark on the next big stage of your life.

The club has helped us gain confidence in our ability to network, build up contacts and settle in to new environments. Our current members are keen individuals, a number of whom act as mentors for other members looking for grad schemes and for some of the tech start-ups that have recently joined the community. Members of the club are your future clients and contacts; what better time to make these than from day one of your career?

We are hoping in the next year to set up other CPC communities in cities throughout the United Kingdom. Come and join the community and get involved at www.citypenguinclub.com.

Jack Diamond is trainee solicitor at City law firm Goodman Derrick LLP, qualifying in September 2013. Daniel Lowen is a trainee solicitor at commercial law firm Heald Solicitors, qualifying in 2014.