This blog reviews what’s actually happening on the ground to careers offices 2011 – 2012 and looks beyond government spin to the reality.  We’re faced with the dissolution of the state-funded careers service accompanied by promises (no funding details attached) about its renewal, phoenix-like, at some stage in the future.   

The government says the new all-age careers service will be in place by April 2012.  Minister John Hayes commits the government to build on the best of the services offered by Next Step (the careers offices for adults) and Connexions (the careers offices for 13 – 19 year olds).  Face to face careers guidance will continue to be available to all, he says, but will be less costly for the public purse. 

Really?

So many of the UK’s state-funded careers offices are closing right now, closures driven by cuts the government’s made to local authorities’ Area Based Grants.  The Minister has signally failed to say or do anything to stop these closures.  He’s done nothing to provide students and others with any alternative sources of advice for the period before the new all-age career service bursts into life April 2012. 

In Norfolk, the county council halved the size and scope of its Connexions careers offices and expects now only to cater for socially disadvantaged youngsters (the NEETs).  That’s tough on students puzzling over university courses and knowing they can’t afford any mistakes, the new price tag for a degree being around £80K.  With 90 staff gone from its careers offices, Norfolk Connexions isn’t even doing that well in helping the NEETs – these youngsters now spend much more time in limbo without courses, training or jobs.     
  
In Sussex, the county council cancelled its contract to provide careers guidance in the county’s schools.  Birmingham City Council is losing 36 staff from its careers offices.

Do the government’s plans suggest a more hopeful future? 

To my mind, theirs is the “polo mint” approach to managing careers guidance – much more hole than mint.  The message from government to schools and local authorities is “our legislation places all the responsibility for careers advice onto you … so you sort out how you’re going to do and pay for it, we’re not even accepting the duty of oversight”. 

Government says there will be a new duty on schools to ensure students in years 9 to 11 have access to impartial, independent careers guidance – but the schools will be free to organise this as they see fit.   Cash-strapped schools have to pay for this careers guidance from within the Dedicated Schools Grant and will be free to pay as much or as little as they choose.   

In business, we call this attitude the “deserter manager syndrome”.  It always produces chaos – essential tasks are missed out or duplicated by the confused, stressed, demotivated workforce.  The state-funded careers offices‘ “customers” will be driven elsewhere (maybe that’s what this government intends).

The life chances of very many young and older people will suffer if the state-funded careers offices disappear.  Private sector careers advice and counselling organisations – such as ourselves – cannot replace them (we can only help those funded by their employers or able to self-fund).

Please take a minute to lobby your MP if you care about students and others having access to free careers advice provided through a national network of careers offices.  Rebuilding a national careers advice service once it’s been destroyed is a long, expensive business – it’s so much better to prevent the service’s destruction before it happens.

Writing your CV back end first is the best bet.  Step into the mindset of the employers and you’ll use the evidence they find most convincing to sell yourself as the perfect candidate.  You won’t get trapped into writing your CV in the format that’s wrong for your career history (a very common mistake).  This approach also means you won’t produce the bland, generic type of CV most recruiters instantly bin! 

You start the process of writing your CV by finding out the employers’ view of the perfect candidate.  Thanks to the internet, this research is easy to do – simply go online and put in the search terms for the type of job you want, then trawl through the job ads.  Save copies of everything that gives useful information about that particular sector of the jobs market and what employers are asking for.

If you’re relying on recruitment consultancies to help you find your next job (not recommended), then you need to list the exact phrases and words agencies use in advertising the jobs that interest you. You have to use exactly the same words and phrases when writing your CV because agencies use these when searching their databases to shortlist candidates for interview.

Go through all your saved material, highlighting every key point (eg the specific qualifications and work experience most employers ask for).  Then summarise the data you’ve highlighted in a master file, ready for use when you begin writing your CV. 

It’s only at this stage – when the employers’ view of the perfect candidate for the job is clear in your head – that you can think about writing your CV to sell your own services.  You structure your CV according to the employers’ priorities – if most of them put budget management skills before technical expertise, you do the same.  You search for objective evidence (eg sales value, increased profitability, etc) when writing your CV so you can evidence each claim about your successes.

What do you do about any mis-matches between what the employers want and what you can offer?  You may have perfectly relevant professional qualifications, for example, but they’re different ones from those most employers ask for. 

As you’re writing your CV solely to get an interview, sometimes you’ll be able to handle this issue by quoting only your most senior qualification (not providing any other detail).  In other instances, the best way around this conundrum is to point out very clearly that your qualification is “equivalent to” the preferred one.  Never, ever assume the recruiter will know this!   

The whole purpose of writing your CV is to get you an interview for the job you want.  Doing the job right will take far more research, thinking and care with your wording than most candidates put into writing their CVs.  Hopefully you agree a bit of graft now is a better option than being half-hearted about writing your CV and watching while the job opportunities go to other people?

The High Fliers Research report focuses exclusively on opportunities for graduate careers with the UK’s biggest and best-known employers – the major banks, oil companies and the like.  These prestige employers expect to increase their 2011 graduate recruitment by 9.4% and starting salaries for most grads will be around £29K.  Encouraging, right? 

If you’re aiming for these graduate careers, the UK universities with most employer appeal are Oxford, Cambridge, Warwick, Manchester and London.  A third of these graduate careers posts will go to grads who’ve already done industrial placements, internships or vac work and / or have been sponsored by their future employers.  Be prepared to live in London or the South East because that’s where most of the jobs are.  Altogether, it’s the early birds (graduating from the right universities, well-organised, well-connected, properly advised and with nests in London) that’ll catch the most juicy graduate careers “worms”. 

Should grads unable to meet this spec forget about trying for proper graduate careers?  Nope.  The High Fliers Research report only covers an incredibly tiny fraction of UK employers. 

You’ll need to use lots more initative to track down the lower profile employers (small, medium and large) that offer graduate careers to UK grads, though the upside is less competition for good posts.  Reconcile yourself to much lower starting pay (eg £12K – £15K in the provinces) but push hard for employer help with post-graduate vocational training (contributions to training fees, mentoring by senior managers and so on).  Get your professional qualifications early, grab opportunities for high-profile work that’ll look good on your CV and graduate careers started with the less glamorous UK employers often match those that began in the prestige companies.         

The Office for National Statistics report explains the position of graduate careers in the UK within the big picture of national and youth employment (16 – 24 year olds).  This wider context makes grim reading – a record 965,000 young people out of work, long-term unemployment up by 2% and the number of UK jobs down by just over half a percent.  Nearly 2 million people have “retired” early.  More people than ever work part-time because they can’t find full-time jobs.  Pay’s up by 1.8%, cost of living up by nearly 5%.   

Against employment stats this bleak, it’s clear students seeking graduate careers have an uphill battle in front of them.  However, their future’s more hopeful than non-grads’ – 20% graduates are out of work but 25% non-graduates are.

The Office for National Statistics data helpfully suggests which regions offer the best and worst employment prospects.  The best places to start UK graduate careers are in the South East or South West, followed by Eastern England.  The most unpromising region is the North-East.  The majority of grads, then, should be looking for graduate careers entry posts with fairly humdrum employers in the southern half of the UK.

Post written by Linda Whittern, Director Careers Partnership (UK).

An independent research study on JobCentre Plus services says 80% its customers are happy – or fairly happy – with the quality of help provided and the way they’re treated.  Somehow these favourable ratings don’t square with the experiences of the mainly professional people I’m in touch with.

The first major complaint concerns how horrendous it is to get through to JobCentre Plus services by ‘phone.  It’s often impossible to get through, even when you try repeatedly at different times of the day.  Staff admit the ‘phone systems aren’t technically up to the job and too few staff are assigned to deal with external calls. 

The next headache is the excruciating delay in paying benefits.  The bills keep coming and very many people have no savings.   Making broke and desperate claimants wait 8 weeks or more for payment is a dreadful way to treat them. 

However, for job seekers what matters is whether Job Centre Plus services are of real value in helping them find new jobs.  Here the complaints come thick and fast:-   

“The job search database they rely on is hopeless. It is full of agencies advertising jobs that don’t exist, job ads for positions that have already been filled, local job searches which throw up jobs hundreds of miles away, and very vague job descriptions.”

“What I term the JobCentrePlus approach doesn’t allow for much selectivity in jobs applied for, but relies on the number of applications to raise the strike rate.  Obviously the rate of making applications can have an effect overall, but does it really replace the well thought out targeted application?”

 “All Job Centre Plus services offer are worthless courses.  I asked for help with my CV. The people they sent me to wrote me a CV filled with spelling mistakes and incomplete sentences, it was worse than my effort.”

“My own experience of Job Centre Plus services is that there is a desire on their part to get you off the unemployment register as quickly as possible.  For those people who are not quite sure which avenue to take or which avenue is right for them, the most expedient route is the one suggested, with one eye on reducing the unemployment register.”

“The general consensus is that Job Centre Plus services are not tailored for highly qualified people or people changing career in the middle of their working lives”.

Thumbs down, then, for the job hunting services JobCentre Plus provides.

There were such high hopes for JobCentre Plus services only a few years ago.  Premises were upgraded, new IT systems introduced and a real effort made to improve staff interaction with “customers” (the new term preferred to the word “claimants”).  Then it became easier for politicians to hide their own failures by labelling the jobless as “benefit scroungers”.  The result?   JobCentre Plus services that are customer unfriendly, inefficient and ill-equipped to help job hunters find new jobs, the benefit policing “tail” wagging the help-providing “dog”.

What do these cuts in the state’s careers advice service mean for your teenagers?  On present evidence, up to half the local careers advice services may go, leaving education and career advice to be dispensed through an online and telephone service.  If your teenagers know what they want to do and just want information (eg about courses), this new truncated careers advice service will deliver what’s needed, better than the face to face service ever could.  The real difficulties arise when your teenagers are uncertain about their future choices.  Careers Advisors with experience of delivering career advice through all these means say face to face contact provides much more useful information to work with than the remote services; it’s also preferred by many students. 

In the future, your teenagers’ sources of education and career guidance will come from a free telephone / online careers advice service staffed by qualified, impartial advisors; or from their college’s in-house advisor (whose impartiality is suspect and who may not be adequately qualified or resourced); or from a private sector provider (impartial, usually well-qualified but only able to help those who self-fund). 

And in the interim, the state careers advice service will be broken up and re-configured yet again.  Goodbye Connexions, goodbye Next Step – hello integrated Careers Advice Services for all ages!  It’ll probably take 5 years to get the new services working smoothly.  How ironic that the latest new scheme for delivering careers advice services is what we first started out with, late in the last century!

Remember, the top interview questions on the employer’s agenda are “Can you do a good job on the project I’m hiring you for?” and “Will you cause me any grief while  you’re working on this  contract?”.  Experienced freelances can deal with these questions by pointing to their track record.    As a newbie to freelancing, you’ll have to take a different tack.

You’ll win the employer over at interview if you show you’re on his wavelength (ie that his top interview questions are ones you’ve already considered and dealt with).   You can’t afford to go into an interview hazy about the benefits of what you’re selling and how you’ll achieve it.  Take the initiative and ask in advance for any extra information you need.   You’re most likely to be selected for the project if you clearly understand its benefits, costs, work steps and timetable so well you’d invest in it personally if you had the money. 

Top interview question’s always what’s the benefit of doing this?  Typically, employers buy in freelance help to produce cost savings (lower production and overheads costs), attract more business, retain more customers and smooth out the work flow.  Sometimes they rely on freelances’ help to build the case why top management should support the project.

Be ready to answer interview questions concerning how this project will produce each of the anticipated benefits.  Work methodically through the likely interview questions “doing A can reasonably be expected to result in X quantifiable benefit, doing B will result in £Y cost savings” and so on. 

Also be ready to explain the evidence basis for saying these benefits will be achieved.  Use logic, published data, interviews with top management on savings achieved elsewhere and your own sources – quote the experience of a relative who’s done a similar job, for example.

Show at interview you’ve anticipated any problems likely to arise during the project (eg difficulty in talking to the top management team at the times you need to do so) and your plans for overcoming or minimising such hitches.

List your answers to these top interview questions in a brief summary (no more than 2 pages) to leave with the employer after your interview.  This written summary will answer top managers’ questions after the interview and shows how committed you are to doing the job well. 

The quality of your interview preparation’s a top priority if you decide on a new career as a freelance.

Hard though it is, remember the legal proverb cui bono (who benefits?) before trying for an unpaid graduate internship. 

Ask yourself why this option is being pushed at today’s grads when nobody else is expected to work without pay.  Yes, the government benefits (grads on full-time graduate internships don’t appear on the unemployment statistics and aren’t eligible for JSA).  Employers short of cash – or just plain mean – benefit too (offer unpaid graduate internships and you get bright people to do your work at zilch cost).  But what about YOU, what benefit will you get from an unpaid graduate internship?   

A graduate internship’s supposed to deliver the work skills, work experience and contacts you’ll need to get a good, properly paid entry post in your chosen profession.  If it doesn’t, it’s a waste of your time.

Remember, you’ve already lots of work experience / skills from the part-time jobs you did during your degree.  Will the unpaid graduate internship you’re considering boost what you can offer enough to make a real difference to your long term career prospects?  Is the employer offering the graduate internship prepared to commit in writing precisely what skills development they’re offering and how much of your time will be spent on these activities?

What about the contacts you’d garner from doing an unpaid graduate internship?  Will they be significantly more useful than those your family, friends and friends’ parents offer you for free?  Don’t knock these informal contacts – chatting to a university friend helped my nephew get a start in the shipping industry and a chance conversation between neighbours found the son of one a rare specialised job with the other’s company.

If you’re willing to take an unpaid graduate internship because that’s how everybody in the sector gets their start, are you targeting the right jobs market?  Worse than normal employment practices for junior workers should warn you the sector offers poor job security and pay for most employees on most rungs of the career ladder.

Too many unpaid graduate internships are rip-offs.  Savvy up and don’t get caught out.

One of the two authors of this careers education and guidance report said:

“There are clear signs that talking to either family members or teachers about future studies when 13 -15 has some positive effects on attitudes to school and on intention to stay in education … there is no evidence of a longer term effect of IAG [careers education and guidance] on actual destinations of young people after 16.”

That’s a deeply worrying finding.  We’ve the worst youth unemployment for years, university’s no longer an option for many … and teenagers are saying they don’t rate and don’t take any notice of the only professional careers education and guidance most will get.  Some teens get their professional careers education and guidance from providers in the private sector (organisations like ours) but why are we leaving the rest to flounder?

There are huge chunks missing from this very detailed, beautifully presented careers education and guidance report.  Nowhere does it ask why the careers education and guidance services are ineffective; nor does it ask how can this dreadful situation be turned around.  Why are these key questions left unanswered?

Career counsellors are their clients’ allies, focus-finders and energisers, their route-maps and tool-kit.  While career counsellors aren’t as cuddly as Bel’s Bonnie, the emotional support they provide in hard times is often as necessary.  Career counsellors help people make good choices of career and overcome the job catastrophes (redundancy, work stress, etc) most of us experience some time in our working lives. 

Career counsellors exist because working life’s got so complicated nowadays.  Contrast my grandad’s educational choices, job hunt and work experience with yours. 

Leaving school at 14, grandad didn’t need a career counsellor to advise about future education and career choices –  the only choices he had were between the different dead end jobs within walking distance.  He turned up in person and asked for any job he wanted (no need for career counsellor input on CV and interview techniques!).  Workplace relationships didn’t provide scope for a career counsellor either – the boss hired and fired at will (though grandad could walk into another job just as easily).  For grandad, work was low risk, low reward all along the line … 

Fast-forward to 2010. 

You’ve umpteen education and career choices so you want a career counsellor’s advice to help you decide which offer the best prospects.  The costs of many wrong decisions now are much, much higher than in grandad’s day (resign yourself to years of retraining if you want to switch professional careers, for example). 

Job search is now an art form.  When you’re competing against a hundred applicants for the job you want, a career counsellor’s professional expertise can make all the difference to how you present yourself and whether the employer picks you. 

It can now cost employers a huge amount of money and aggro when workplace relationships sour.  If you and your boss start hating each other, your employer may see funding a career counsellor to restore calm as the better, cheaper alternative to fighting an employment tribunal case.

Every society generates its own specialist jobs (eg Search Engine Optimisation posts only became necessary as the world wide web developed).  The new role of career counsellor is a by-product of the chaos and sheer complexity of today’s fast-changing, sometimes brutal world of work.

The first is the Cameron and Clegg decree “cutting the deficit’s got to be the highest priority, that’s what government ministers have to work at whatever else they do”. 

Most of us don’t see the nation’s highest priority as being the deficit, we’re far more scared about the 25% – 40% shutdown in public spending pushing us – and everyone else – out of work.  There’s a terrifying silence from Messrs Clegg and Cameron about their responsibility for finding new work for those their hack and burn policy will put out of a job.

My second beef has to do with the way dropping the default work retirement age is treated in the press and elsewhere. 

The gloss that’s been put on it is that it’s socially liberating to encourage people to work on beyond what would be normal retirement age.  A whole herd of “elephants in the room” galumph around such an evil proposition.  The sad truths are that millions would love to retire from work but can’t afford to – because governments and employers have mis-managed pensions for decades – and we’re still only at the earliest stages of tackling age discrimination at work.  We’ve frighteningly high youth unemployment.  Encouraging older people to try to work on past retirement is a sneaky device to excuse further government failures on upgrading pensions; the price will be paid by jobless school leavers and new graduates.