21st July 2010 | Posted in Economics, Latest news, Management
The Association of Graduate Recruiters have reported a tightening of the jobs market for recent graduates. A 7% drop in vacancies; a hold in starting salary at around £25,000; an increasing preference from employers for candidates with a 2:1 and an average of 69 applications for each role make pretty grim reading for the recent crop of young hopefuls.
Its easy to attribute this to the times that we live in but a look at the labour market as a whole gives pause for thought. Robert Walters, Michael Page and Hays, big recruiters in middle management occupations, report high levels of placements and are growing their own teams to cope with demand. The Office for National Statistics show an increase of those in work, albeit a small one, and a CIPD/KPMG survey of employers in April showed that the private sector was back in hiring mode. So what about the poor old graduates, then? Some clue may lay in the National Strategic Skills Audit which published the first of its intended annual reports on the make-up of UK employment in the Spring.
One of the axioms of British thinking about its response to globalisation is that the knowledge economy is going to save us from the Brazilian/Russian/Indian/Chinese hoards who are going to run the world’s economy in the future. We are going to be high-tech, clever people who can leave all of the doing to the new boys and make lots of money by inventing stuff and, um, telling people how to do things better. If you temporarily ignore the colonial overtones in this approach it sounds OK, but why don’t we have jobs for graduates, then? A close reading of the National Strategic Skills Audit might give us a pointer. First of all we see reductions in employment more or less where we expect them – those earning their living as typists, tool makers and textile workers have all reduced in large percentages. When we look at increases, ‘though, we get some surprises. Refuse and salvage occupations have increased by 104%, Beauticians by 63%, Driving Instructors by 91%. Yes, there are some brainy jobs in there: we have 67% more Psychologists and 94% more Town Planners (God save us), but most of the growth is in semi-professional work – we have 109% more Legal Associates, 91% more Teaching Assistants and 114% more Paramedics than we used to.
While the government dithers between a political rock and an economic hard place over unpalatable options for University funding, the OECD reports that we are producing graduates at a rate which puts us at only 10th amongst their 30 members but we are struggling to find roles for even this number of graduates and our record of skilled job creation is one of the OECD’s worst. This is the worst of both worlds – we are producing graduates but we can’t find any work for them. Meanwhile outsourcing legal work to India seems to be the next big thing on the desks of law firms and their larger clients. What price our knowledge economy now?
The answer for current graduates is clearly a re-definition of ‘graduate work’. The Head Teachers of two local schools told us delightedly yesterday that they have taken on a handful of unpaid teaching assistants for next term – graduates who have not been able to find places in teacher training who are desperate for meaningful work experience. With the police considering a similar scheme it seems that a degree is now a passport to working for free: well worth saddling yourself with debt or paying all that extra tax for. Those employers with real work to offer clever and hard working folk, the time might never have been better to consider your own definition of ‘graduate work’ and see if there is not an opportunity in all this confusion.
I’m glad you like the design.
My phone numbers are on the site and I’ll look forward to your call so we can have the debate.
What I wouldnt give to have a argue with you about this. You just blurt so many things that come from out of nowhere that Im fairly certain Id have a good shot. Your blog is great visually, I mean people wont be bored. But others who can see past the videos and the layout won’t be so impressed with your generic awareness of this theme.
Kevin, if I get a spare moment today I’ll follow this up on my blog.
I think this raises so many issues about what we’ve come to expect as society and what we are going to have to get used to in the future. My fear is that this is not a temporary blip but the shape of things to come, as the world re-balances and the West’s dominance is eroded.
Terrific post.
I think the times we live in call for a radical rethink of “work” as we know it generally, and I like what you’re saying here about how that might apply to graduate jobs.
Of course, I think the shoe needs to be on the other foot too with graduates themselves needing to break the old paradigms about what they can and can’t do, and, frankly, thinking innovatively about how they can market their skills in ways that are broader than the old “graduate recruitment programmes”.