As George Osborne yesterday announced his eagerly awaited Budget, graduates expecting him to wave a magic wand and diminish graduate unemployment may have been left a little disappointed. The government has pledged to create 100,000 work experience placements for 18-21 year olds, focusing particularly on providing work experience in highly skilled trades. While NUS President Aaron Porter has welcomed the 'aspiration to create more apprenticeships' he has stressed that 'this needs to be backed up with resources and support if access to this form of study is to be widely taken up by employers'.
In a similar way, the decision by the government to create 24 new University technical colleges has been met with trepidation. While one hopes that the implementation of such a pledge will address 'the poor recognition of the value of higher education', Aaron Porter aptly notes that 'this is not an alternative to ensuring proper resourcing for existing colleges that do so much for our economy and society'. While such promises made to tackle 'youth unemployment' are pleasing, and we soon-to-be/current graduates do not want to appear self-involved, these measures fail to actively address graduate unemployment.
We can now only hope that the ??300m funding allocated to solving 'youth unemployment' between 18-24 year olds, which the Chancellor recognises as having been 'on a steady rise', improves the currently dismal outlook for graduates. George Molyneaux, research director at Salary Services Limited (SSL) has voiced similar concerns about the fate of current graduates in particular in the IT field 'We have still got 17% of last years IT graduates without employment. How do we get these into work?' GRB have many IT clients seeking high calibre Computing graduates however these graduate jobs often remain unfilled due to a national shortage of Computing graduates.
For Molyneaux the solution lies in financial incentives 'in the form of NI (National Insurance) adjustments or an apprenticeship allowance' being provided by the government to encourage businesses to get hiring. According to a recent report by E-Skills UK, the IT industry is set to grow 2.19% a year over the next decade requiring 110,000 new recruits to ensure progress. While graduates in the IT field may face an uphill struggle to grasp fleeting graduate prospects, graduates hoping to break into the world of finance may take encouragement from yesterday's budget briefing.
The Chancellor announced to Parliament 'We want the City of London to remain the world's leading centre for financial services' thus supporting the efforts being made to retain a high level of employment by banks in the capital. As the rest of the country struggles through the worse economic conditions since the 1930s investment banks in Europe's financial capital are adding jobs. While PricewaterhouseCoopers increased the number of graduate positions and internship opportunities in 2010 to the record number of 1600, accounting firm KMPG has plans to increase its London headcount from 11,000 to 14,000 over the next three years.
With such measures in place, alongside support from the government, it looks as though graduates hoping to break into the financial sector can sleep easy (after applying as soon as possible). Meanwhile for other less fortunate graduates the waiting game continues. With graduate unemployment at an all-time high it thus seems imperative that the government now focus its efforts on fairly distributing funding in order to address graduate as well as 'youth unemployment'.
Elise, GRB Journalist
