When David Bowie and Queen collaborate you know its going to be good. One of my all-time favourite songs is Under Pressure recorded back in 1981. I tend to be attracted to the rhythms rather than the lyrics but with this particular song, the words always held a special resonance for me and today, thirty years later, they may well strike a chord with plenty of others.
Under pressure
Pressing down on me
Pressing down on you
Splits a family in two
Puts a family on the street.
In times of economic hardship the daily pressure of living, surviving, take sits toll on many of us but in my experience the young have generally been relatively sheltered from the extremes of pressure experienced by adults.
I suspect that is no longer the case and university students and recent graduates are feeling pressures like never before. Figures released last month by the Office for National Statistics showed that graduate unemployment is at a 15 year high with one in five recent graduates yet to find work. On top of which graduate debt continues to rise. AGR research published last summer pointed to a rise in job applications to an average of 69 for each graduate vacancy.
Hardly surprising then that some graduate recruiters are noticing a rising incidence of graduates buckling under pressure in selection processes. This is a clear indication of the stress that candidates are under to secure that all important first step on the career ladder. Stress that may well be exacerbated by parental expectations.
I can still recall my entry into the labour market. A job offer in May to start in September encouraged me to spend my summer working in a holiday camp. Returning home to take up a career as an actuary I discovered that the job had been offered to someone else who had already started working. By this time most companies had filled their vacancies so it was not until December that I started work. Those three months of involuntary inactivity and lack of income (I was too proud to sign on) took their toll and my self confidence and self esteem nose-dived.
To think that there are over one million unemployed young people in this country today is not only sad but very worrying. Are we creating a lost generation? I hope not but I cannot see how someone who graduated in 2009 or 2010 for that matter and is still hunting for that first career break can be anything but disheartened and demoralised. I hope that the signs of improvements in the economy and the labour market will not pass these young people by.
Employers can help by not making subjective judgements on applicants who have a CV lacking much work experience. They should also take into account the toll that months of unemployment might have had on the confidence of a graduate whose career ambitions have been shattered by the accident of graduating during a depression.
In this column I generally offer advice to graduates on how to improve their job prospects. I will continue to extol the virtues of taking any job rather than no job but I do recognise how difficult that can be for some, hence the record unemployment levels.
Unemployment, as it turns into long-term unemployment, can split families in two and put people on the streets. As a society, yes even a big society, those of us with the good fortune to be in work should show genuine sympathy and compassion for those without a job and do what we can to help them into meaningful work. This could range from offering advice and encouragement; to improved understanding of an individual's circumstances; to offering internship and work experience opportunities; to not excluding people from the selection process on a set of assumptions that gaps in applications so easily can induce.
There's a line in the song that goes 'Let me out'. All that unemployed graduates are asking for is to be let in!
Carl Gilleard
