For careers advisers, the current economic clouds have a silver lining: although it is harder for graduates to find graduate jobs, humanities students need less encouragement to make use of Careers Services than previously, and some institutions are making extra money available to improve services.
Paul Redmond, Head of the Careers Service at Liverpool, portrayed the current employment situation for graduates with a set of ’crunchonomics’ statistics and concluded that the era of ’employability’ has passed. With 80 graduates competing for every graduate job, vacancies down 17%, and most people graduating with a 2:1, it’s now more about attitudes than skills. (As one of the employers present said, ‘A 2:1 unlocks the door, it doesn’t open it’.) Qualifications are taken as a given, and graduates need something more, usually acquired via extra-curricular activities, to make them stand out from the crowd. Paul admitted that, sadly, there is a class dimension at work here, with middle-class parents more adept at giving their children the broader experiences, and finding them the internships, that will lead to that important ’first job’. Indeed, Liverpool is helping its students to find internships to try to level the playing field.
For the humanities student, the implication is that s/he can no longer regard university as a pleasant interlude before beginning the process of finding a job. That process needs to begin from the first year, so that they have time to gather the ideas and experiences they need in order to be well placed when it comes to job hunting at the end of the final year. You might want to point your students towards the Subject Centre’s ’After English’ website www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/afterenglish/, which is full of ideas and activities to encourage students in career planning.
But the day was far from being all doom and gloom. For many companies outside finance it’s ’business as usual’, and one of the employers present from food retail said he was taking on more graduates than the year before. But there is a problem in that students, panicked by the press and no doubt prodded by anxious parents, are making dozens of applications to organisations they have no real knowledge of or interest in. (One recruiter from a large supermarket told of reading an application that waxed lyrical about why the applicant was committed to a career in the company and concluded that he ‘really, really wanted to work for Shell‘.) Faced with a flood of poor applications, top firms are using ’Weapons of Mass Rejection’, and there is some fear that equal opportunities may be suffering as a consequence.
It was, however, apparent that Careers Services are gearing up to the new ’AD’ (After-the-Downturn) era and there is a real will to help humanities students through the difficult times. In the afternoon, several Careers Services demonstrated how they are doing this using a variety of innovative methods: videos, internship and enterprise modules and graduate case studies to name but a few. Careers advisers are ready and willing to help students cope with a credit-crunched world – students should make good use of them!
Jane Gawthrope
English Subject Centre
