When researching their future prospects, students could be forgiven for garnering a pretty bleak image of the graduate recruitment market and their own position within it. Increasingly commonplace are complaints from graduate recruiters themselves about the state of today's youth; how ill-equipped they have been at university with the skills required to meet the demands of any graduate position. The narrative is a common one, and for students so at home in the university bubble it can seem an undeniable one, with little reason to be disbelieved.
A recent report by the British Chambers of Commerce was particularly blunt in this respect, deeming the education system as a whole to be failing to fulfil its responsibilities to those within it - it's not your fault, students, but there's nothing you can do about it, the report would seem to say.
This view is at best a narrow-minded one that doesn't correlate with statistics regarding graduate employment as a whole. First of all, a large majority of leading graduate employers, the same figures who are seen to be so influential in lambasting the UK's graduates, are still even throughout the economic downturn fulfilling a huge amount of graduate positions with candidates that they themselves deem to be suitable. To do this and then complain about these same candidates being poorly prepared for the workplace could arguably be a failure of the recruitment process itself, and not the education one.
Yet more significantly, there are those realms of graduate employment where the demand for new graduates outstrips the supply. Fields such as energy, environment and transport have been recently highlighted to be struggling to fulfil their available vacancies with suitable candidates. The lack of those qualified for such roles actually wanting them can be put down not to an overall employability malaise but to a lack of applicants in comparison with fields such as management consultancy and the media - those which tend to have the much higher profile in the careers research process at university.
So when looking into your potential career options, don't be alarmed by the apocalyptic tales of useless education that are all too common in the press. Think instead about your own ability to stand out from the crowd when applying for those jobs which despite these complaints still have a huge number of suitable applicants, and at the same time explore those options that themselves are perhaps having less success in raising their profile in the eyes of prospective employees.
Jon, GRB Journalist
