Many of today's graduates are changing their original plans to attain that golden graduate job and are embarking instead on new adventures and most recently, entrepreneurial endeavours. Those Graduates who have failed to secure a graduate job since completing their degree, spurred on by the testing economy and surrounding competition, are bringing about a would-be career change of their own volition. While the common mantra that is instilled into the minds of young people that 'if you work hard, get into university and secure a top graduate job you will be successful' may be a comforting life plan for the graduate grieving the end of university, it is also an idealistic and outdated vision.
The graduates are making a stand. No longer will graduates be defeated by claims that they are devoid of the necessary skills required for that all-important graduate job; today's graduates are deciding instead to become their own boss. This is not to say, however, that becoming an entrepreneur is simply a renegade choice for the disgruntled graduate, rather it is becoming an increasingly viable career path for graduates struggling to compress their varied interests, both academic and extra-curricular, into the specification of any single graduate job.
Tarun Gupta, an Oxford Graduate who, knee deep in the financial security that a graduate job brings, realised that his varied skills and interests were not being manifested in the job he had chosen and thus made a drastic career change. Having originally worked in a top graduate job in the finance sector, today he can be
found working for the NHS and vouching for the benefits of a change in plan. Gupta is a prime example of a graduate unprepared to settle for any old graduate career.
So what are the hold-backs to changing your plans? A drastic career change, or in the case of graduates, a change in plan, is a brave decision. The realisation that that which you have worked towards throughout your undergraduate degree may now be unattainable is both daunting and unnerving. Gupta notes that whereas in the US, Ivy League Universities cater for unsatisfied graduates, those who maybe have embraced the world of work and do not feel they are fulfilling the potential they have by offering joint degree programmes which recognise the diversity of people's interests and abilities. Gupta comments: 'This is something that the UK lacks at the moment.' UK graduates are instead placed under obscene amounts of pressure to secure a graduate job, preferably before they have even graduated. Heaven forbid a graduate should change their mind or simply not know for certain what they want to do.
The recent trend of graduate entrepreneurs poignantly displays this refusal by graduates to be, both pressured into entering top graduate jobs before their cap-and-gown has even been returned and to then remain in such jobs if they fail to be all that the graduate hoped they would. It therefore seems that soon-to-be graduates need not be deterred by a feeling of dread that they either, have failed to thus far secure a post degree job, or have yet to even determine what they want that job to be. Today's graduates are undeterred by their perfect job being possibly unavailable, they are rolling with the times and either changing their employer, or becoming their own.
After all, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Elise, GRB Journalist
