Using the search facility

One of the easiest ways to find what you are looking for is to use the Search facility.

Complete the box in the top right-hand corner of the page with ‘keywords’ you think are relevant and click on the arrow.

For best results, it's important to choose your keywords wisely. Keep these tips in mind:

• If you are looking for a specific job title – use that title.  For example use "Teacher" rather than "Teaching"
• Try the obvious first. If you're looking for information on CVs, enter "CV" rather than "Curriculum Vitae"
• Make keywords as specific as possible. "Labour Market Information" gets more relevant results than "Economic Information on jobs".
• Don’t use words like ‘the’ or ‘and’ or other redundant words in your search.

Words to avoid:

• Jobs – the site has lots of information on jobs.  If you are looking for jobs – use the Find out about your chosen job or course area.
• News – the site has many pages of news, and many are held in archive pages.A search on News will find all of these.
• Events – for the same reason as above.
• Career or Careers – the site is all about Careers so every page may be returned in your search.

The search will present a page of results for you. At the top of the page are the ‘Best Bets’ which should be the pages that the search has found which are most relevant to your keywords. This is not always what you might expect.  The search picks out pages which use the word most often.Under the best bets will be a list of all the pages that the search has found and these are in alphabetical order.