Education & Work A Dux, Bachelor and Masters Graduate

Clearly too much theory without application is not going to put you ahead of someone with even limited experience in the field. A balance between the two is critical in making oneself marketable.

Perhaps there needs to be more programs that bridge this gap as part of the curriculum, or at least more flexible delivery to allow for experience to be gained while studying.

 

Too much hands on your time.

 

or the other way round.

 

Talking to employers - one of their big bugbears is that they struggle to find young people willing to turn up and work set hours (without leaping onto FB every 2 minutes), who have the ability to hold a conversation (apparently a biggie), can apply common sense and are willing to "do what needs to be done" rather than sticking strictly to what their employment statement says.

It's not so much about having qualifications - but being employable

 

WOW, what a brilliant explanation this is. Everyone should check it out - it has nice pics too
Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy - Wait But Why

 

Credit to JKat first.

 

I know people that have deliberately supported their children in going into a uni degree for which the job prospects are literally ONE job in this country. And to get that job on the market you have to wait for the person currently in the job to die or retire. Do what makes you happy they say. Meanwhile mum and dad pay the bills and feed the child and pay the uni tuition.

I think a more appropriate approach is "Do what makes you happy as a hobby, provided said hobby doesn't harm others or is against the law. Choose a profession that will actually generate you a reasonably reliable income and simultaneously enable you to upskill and shift to other roles as the economy changes and roles become non-existent in your current field."

 

I think my +1 wouls divorce me if I did.

 

I wonder what your hobby is!

 

Kids switch off after "Do what makes you happy...<blah blah>"

 

This is a double sided problem.

The stat is absolutely inflated by the vast amount of people who do nothing degrees. There are a ton of people doing degrees that don't even have jobs at the end of them. If you study advanced colouring in then you'll struggle to get a job. I did a minor in marketing while I was doing my degree and I can remember the lecturer telling us that there would be about 5 graduate positions available in WA from our class of about 200 people. Now while that particular degree has probably improved due to social media advertising creating whole new markets, other jobs will have cancelled that gain out mostly.

On the flip side, and this may be more a Perth issue than Australia wide, it is incredibly hard to get jobs even with the employable degrees. Graduate positions these days want 1-3 years of experience in many of the major fields (Engineering, Finance and Law in particular) which of course is pretty difficult to have straight out of uni. It's a vicious circle, kids can't get a job because they don't have the experience and they can't get the experience because they don't have a job, which is why so many end up going back to university and adding letters after their names in the hope that having that will trump not having experience for those graduate positions and then you get employers saying you're overqualified.

The other problem is kids are coming out so computer illiterate and untrained that the cost of actually hiring them is often far greater than any immediate benefit. Kids who can't set up a computer or use simple excel functions are the norm now somehow.

 

If you finish studies at a bad time, it might be worth considering to start up your own business. Because there is some stat I read that said that businesses that start up in hard times and survive have a much higher average longevity than businesses that start up in good times.

But I've never been a self employed person except for the Airbnbing... always had the fortune to have employment from someone else. But who knows... maybe if I struggled getting a job after being made redundant by Amex I could have gone down that route (most likely via franchise). I think we might see a higher % of younger people going the self employment route....

 

How many go overseas or "take a break " after studying.... Cause they worked soooo hard for their piece of paper.
And how many continue casual/part time employment arrangements with their intern companies. We had a few engineers that did their internship fire peanuts then finished study but they were kept on the casual agreement cause they were cheap until they found other work

I started online/correspondence degree... What a bunch of oxygen theives those "educated" people are!! It was the most complicated bunch of crap, no wonder these kids can't find jobs cause they're to busy playing politics or twidly winks than working!

 

True, but once those fields start to boom and there is more work available they'll get a start. During "boom" times the dead wood floats up, when things slow the dead wood is tossed back where they should be

 

I heard that one 30 years ago. It doesn’t change.

I still haven't seen the advert for chairman, ASX Listed company, no experience necessary.

 

One of my tenants in GF came as a student to live independently, working and studying in Psychology. As time passes, he recognised the value of hands on work and started working in a specific area more and more, now he's ditching studies for a year and concentrate on the work before returning...from my conversations with him, I think he's going to make a very psychologist in his specific area 5 or 6 years from now. Papers without experience is pretty useless.

 

This doesn't really work though, how many people come out of uni with the money to start up a business or even more unlikely to buy one? The reality of exiting uni these days is that you've got 30k of debt (if you're lucky) and a piece of paper to show for it.

Banks will not lend you anything without security, generally they wont lend you very much even with it for business because it is seen as risky (correctly).

Starting a business with no capital is insanely hard and makes you very likely to fail. When you've got to pay rent and eat it becomes even harder given the lag generally between income and starting.

It's not impossible, those with very specific skill sets in particular it's very possible but for the vast majority it's even less likely than getting a job!

 

No one is talking about that, I'm specifically talking about graduate positions which are becoming harder and harder to get in most industries.

It's perfectly reasonable for the jobs at the top to require experience, it's perfectly reasonable for the middle and intermediate roles to require experience but for graduate positions? It's certainly making it hard for graduates who haven't had any chance to get that experience because they've been getting the degree it requires to get that experience.

I understand it from the employers point of view, training today's graduates is an expensive pain in the ass, they want graduates that someone else has taught excel, that someone else has taught the basics. It just makes it hard on those graduates who had to work their way through uni and couldn't take unpaid positions to get the experience because they had to work 30 hours a week in a bar to eat and have a roof.

Again, you'll find I'm squarely on the side that the majority of the problem is people doing nothing degrees, the amount of people who complain about not getting a job with a degree in creative writing or similar is just absurd but the number of people with degrees in mechanical engineering, finance and law that can't find jobs is growing rapidly.

 

No doubt at all, we're rapidly approaching a recession it would seem (if we aren't already in it) and thus times are particularly hard right now. Most companies are now in full fledged survival mode, they're not hiring and they're often laying off staff. They're slashing wages where they aren't firing.

We're probably years from the next boom though at this point and an awful lot of that dead wood has already been tossed back in, which makes it harder on those just finishing degrees. If you've got a desperate intermediate that's willing to work on a graduate wage and you've got a raw graduate, who are you choosing?