A graduate rants...about graduates

Every news article in Britain over the past few months has been filled with doom and gloom. From ‘No Jobs’, to ‘Train Fair increase’ (grr), ‘Death of the Euro’ and ‘Peacocks going into administration’.... well Peacocks isn’t such a bad thing, but still.

Not exactly a great way to enter a new year. Why can’t we look on this as an opportunity? ‘No Jobs’, for example is just not true - Aspire Global Network is buzzing. I think the reality of the situation is that people today, in particular young people (I’m 21 by the way so this is not a young vs old rant) expect finding work to be easy. We are given career advice before we even get to university, “You must find what is right for you, something that will excite you and which you will love instantly- the perfect fit”.

No one tells you that there is no such thing as absolutely loving every second of your very first job. You have to work hard and be bored occasionally. You won’t get accepted into the first job you send your CV in to, you won’t even get an interview.

I was horrified to watch two graduates being interviewed on the BBC a couple of months ago. The interview was based on the huge rise in young people in unemployment and the tone was dreary- “it must be terrible for you...”etc and when asked how many jobs they had applied for one replied- 4 whole jobs and not a single interview! The other said he had walked all the way into town to hand his CV around - all that way!! Well, frankly you don’t deserve to be employed if that is the total sum of your effort to find a job. I don’t mean to sound scarily like Jeremy Clarkson, but it’s true.

 The problem is that career advisors, parents, friends and teachers all encourage you that you are wonderful and you can get any job you want, so you shouldn't settle for second best. This results in young people being picky about salary and the every day duties of the entry level jobs available. The 4 jobs that Grad on the BBC probably applied for were Rocket Scientist, Stockbroker, Marine Biologist and Astronaut... well maybe not so extreme, but jobs around 25K and with the most exciting job description in the world.

We are an impatient era. I don’t pretend I’m not the same - I am horribly impatient; I want to own my own company (don’t know what yet) and work from home (wherever that may be) and I want it now! Getting ahead of ourselves is what being young is all about, but in reality you have to apply to hundreds of jobs, you have to hand out your CV to everyone you see and you have to accept that maybe your 8 GCSEs don’t necessarily mean that you deserve a top graduate job in advertising. You have to lower your expectations and get on with it. The quicker you realise this, the better jobs you will get. There are plenty of graduate jobs out there; they just require you to have done a boring job first, or had an unpaid job for a while (Yes, I said unpaid...no.salary.at.all).

So when I say that all of this doom and gloom is an opportunity, I mean that we need to re assess what young people should be looking for in a first job and make sure they are going about it in the right way. I also read recently that Boris Johnson agrees with me, so I must be right. Rant over.