Graduate careers advice should get real!
Posted on 11:26pm, 1st April 2010 • 1 Comment
As an experienced careers counsellor and the veteran of earlier, equally horrendous recessions, I think we should be offering graduate careers advice that’s more realistic and better tailored to the circumstances grads find themselves in.
Today’s graduate careers advice varies from the despairing (take any job you can get, however dreary and badly paid – it might lead somewhere) to the ill thought out (stay busy – do a post-graduate degree or a second “gap” until the graduate jobs market improves). There’s rising fury about the graduate careers advice students were offered before they applied to university. New grads say there wasn’t much point studying for a degree when graduates are now ten-a-penny and they face stiff competition even for the unpaid work experience they hope will lead to their first professional jobs.
Despondent graduates should take heart from the best research* that’s been done recently into typical graduate careers. Its findings are that 43% those surveyed weren’t able to obtain graduate jobs when they first left uni, however 85% graduates were “reasonably satisfied” with the way their careers developed in the 7 years since graduating. In brief, the careers advice a graduate received did pay off for most grads eventually (though 11% remained stuck in low-paying non-graduate careers).
This careers research also shows that graduates are still attracting a salary premium – though women and mature graduates get much less of a hike to their income than young male graduates.
So, my careers advice to a graduate in 2010 is that they’ve better chances than they might think of getting worthwhile jobs in the medium-term future. If a graduate is to avoid the misery of under-employment or unemployment at the start of their careers, however, my advice is they’ll need to work much more intelligently and effectively at self-marketing than most do now. If they’re women or mature graduates they’ll need to put even more effort into their self-marketing than the young male grads.
Intelligent self-marketing requires “warts and all” self-knowledge so you can pick out the right career direction for you and make a sensible assessment of the progress you should aim for over the medium-term. For example, a highly innovative graduate isn’t likely to do well in most small “metal-bashing” businesses – good advice is to save themselves and their interviewers a lot of grief by hunting out more promising opportunities elsewhere.
Once armed with a very clear, precise view of the “product” (themselves), each graduate needs to develop an equally exact picture of their particular “market” (the employers with suitable careers opportunities to offer) and the “messages” their target customers will be most receptive to. Few graduates do these analyses properly, in spite of their up to date training in research methods and in “writing for a purpose” (project reports, exam answers, etc). The good news is that the graduate who does this can reasonably hope their careers will take off far sooner than their equally hard-working but less clued up peers.
The best careers advice a graduate can get today is to think a lot more and not to start writing their CVs or applying for jobs until they’ve done so. There are far too many graduates who’ve been through the heartache of applying for over 250 jobs without getting a single job offer.
* Seven Years On: Graduate Careers in a Changing Labour Market – Kate Purcell (Employment Studies Research Unit, University of West of England) & Peter Elias (Institute for Employment Research, University of Warwick), 2004.
Insightful article. It will be interesting to see how the graduate market pans out in 2010. Hopefully employers will re-evaluate their graduate intakes as they realise nurturing and keeping talent is a far better investment in the long run.
Marcella Boatswain • 12th April, 2010 at 4:34 pm