Dipping my toes as I am in the shallows of the job market, I thought it was high time to write about the difficulties facing graduates at the moment. Although, come to think of it, the metaphor is hardly a good one, the pool of jobs being somewhat depleted these days. But nevertheless, I live in the hope that one day I’ll be able to embark on the voyage of a Proper Career.
Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of articles about young people struggling to find jobs. There are the school leavers forced out of education because they can’t manage without EMA, but unable to find a job because they don’t have enough qualifications; the graduate who has applied for 836 jobs; the intern expected to work for free at an anti-slavery charity. It’s easy to dismiss these stories as extreme examples, but the truth is, they’re pretty commonplace. Since graduating, I’ve applied for about 30 jobs, and I haven’t heard anything; and it’s no wonder, when some of the ads attracted nearly 100 applications each. To pay the bills and my loans, I’ve recently taken a job managing a coffee shop, which is hardly going to make use of my degrees in literature. Just this week, my flatmate, who is a qualified architect, speaks four languages, and is studying for a masters, quit her unpaid internship when she was asked to clean the toilet.
I came across an interesting phrase the other day: as Paul Mason of the BBC noted earlier this year, the “graduate with no future” is emerging as a new sociological category. The UK’s universities are churning out more graduates than ever before, many of whom are struggling to find employment which makes use of the skills they spent thousands to attain. At the moment, I seem to be firmly stuck in this category, and, like so many others, I being confronted with the stark truth that in the current climate, there are simply not enough jobs for us all.
Putting the political aspects of the situation to one side, I wonder what the sociological implications will be? The fate of the “graduate with no future” is unlikely to improve when the economy finally picks up. Even in a wildly optimistic vision of the future, in which the amount of graduate positions each year is equal to the amount of graduates, who can guarantee that employers will look kindly on those who have been out of university for a few years but haven’t been able to gather any professional experience outside of Macdonalds? (Or in my case, coffee chains. Sigh.)
Previous generations of graduates have had, if not a job for life, at least the prospect of a steady career path and progression. It is on this schema that the usual life plan was formulated: house ownership, marriage and children all depend on the confidence in the future that the expectation of a steady career provides. Many of today’s graduates, forced by student debt and limited job opportunities to accept any job that comes along, there is little confidence in the prospect of a career. Planning for the future is therefore all but impossible. Who can say when the job market will pick up? Or if we will ever be able to break into our desired fields? And further in the future, who among us can even begin to imagine buying a home, getting married, or starting a family? Although the country’s economic prospects will eventually improve, this generation of graduates with no future will probably be marked, financially, professionally and personally, for a long time by the economic crisis in which they unintentionally came of age.
of life and other distractions 