The figures
released today showcasing just how bad youth unemployment is in this
country should come as no surprise really.
When there are a lack of jobs in the market anyway due to
economic issues, it will always be the youngest who suffer most as they are the
ones with no experience in the workplace. When it comes to a choice between “experience”
and “enthusiasm” on a CV, an employer is bound to choose the former as they can
dive straight into work without being given any training, thus easing the
transition from one employee to another.
It makes sense as an employer to do that but try telling
that to anyone of the 1 million or so young people out of work right now.
The stock image on any TV news report when it comes to
stories regarding youth unemployment is a shot of a Job Centre Plus with
aggressive looking people wearing tracksuits outside it, maybe smoking a
cigarette or sticking a hand down the front of their trackie bottoms.
But this is a false image; this is a problem across this
generation regardless of qualifications gained. I know many people who
graduated from university with me this year who are struggling to find a job,
let alone a career-based job that there degree course was geared toward and I
equally know that people who left school at 16 (thanks to the magic of
Facebook) are struggling to find work.
For myself, training as a journalist and graduating with a
2:1 degree and a full set of NCTJ prelim qualifications would, from the outside
world, look like the perfect recipe to jump straight into a newspaper career.
Add in work experience stints at four local papers, a national magazine,
writing for an online blog (plus my own blog) and an editor’s position on my
student newspaper under my belt, I couldn’t be possibly more appealing to an
employer.
However, throughout my time at university I was constantly
told by my lecturers that you would need an awful bloody lot to stand out to
employers in the field of journalism and I am very thankful for this advice as,
after graduating, it helped me come to terms with one of the great fallacies of
Higher Education and indeed of education as a whole in this country; get yourself
a degree and you will get you the job you want. It’s the ‘fact’ that gets
people going to university.
Quite simply, there is no guarantee of this. The reasons
behind this are numerous and won’t be explored here but they include a sagging
job market and huge student numbers in the 21st century.
I find myself currently working at a supermarket for 30
hours a week and, whilst not exactly being happy about the situation, I will
never ever complain about it as it is a job and a source of income which, as
today’s figures show, makes me very lucky.
Furthermore, it has allowed me to buy a car and go
travelling for a month and might even make me more grounded if I do manage to
get the job I want.
Lastly, it gives me the impetus to keep searching for the
career job that I want as if I have a crap day, it makes me want to get out of
the place even more and give me more of a reason to fire off that CV again or
send another email or make that phone call that might just open up the door.
Do I feel as if I am overqualified for the job I do? Yes, a
little bit, particularly when I get a dirty look from a customer as if I’m a
piece of dirt that won’t come off their shoe but that’s part of the game and
part of the job and I know that.
But I am one of the luckier ones (the luckiest ones are
those that have a job in the field they want but, as with any luck, they’ve earned
it) and I’m sure many young people, graduate or otherwise, would be happy with
having my job right now.
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