The Work Clinic

Being skilled is all the more important in an increasingly global economy and attaining the right skills and good qualifications is essential to securing quality well-paid jobs after school, college or university. But employers will also go far and wide to find employees with the right skills. While 90% of employers are recruiting STEM graduates from the UK, shortages mean over a quarter (27%) are recruiting from the EU15 and 11% from India.

The CBI survey is an alarm call to students and universities, as it highlights the importance employers place on the ‘softer’ skills that make people more employable. This means being a good team-worker, communicator and problem-solver is vital and getting work experience goes a long way with a future employer. Possessing these skills will take you a long way, as employers will be willing to supplement them with job specific training.

Many of the 'best' universities are very conscious of their graduates' need for ‘positive attitudes’ as well as 'employability skills' and offer a number of programmes for the students during their course of study towards these objectives. For example at Kingston University, the areas identified in the CBI’s research are covered at the under-graduate and post- graduate level via modules on organisational behaviour as well as personal and professional development workshops. Yes, I do believe having a positive attitude to work and working with others is a fair expectation for employers to have and am glad that universities are striving to develop these critical factors in their students.

Forgive me for asking, but quite aside from the key question of “fairness” in expecting new entrants to the labour market to have so many of these so-called employability skills, do these findings show us that CEOs should never ever be let near surveys on their own, without a chaperone?

They cite “relevant work experience” as the second most important attribute and yet these are allegedly new entrants to the market. Does this mean that our precocious new graduates are now expected to rock up to their interviews fully prepared to explain how serving in the Union bar, or shelf stacking at the local supermarket to keep their student loan under control, has fully equipped them in the workplace to become the next captain of industry? I suspect not... I also wonder if the CEOs polled would like to reflect on how prepared they were when they entered employment as raw graduates with this “employability X factor” list that seems to be so desirable to them now? Some of us might be able to guess the answer to that one...

Final thought – no-one could dislike that beautifully formed list of skills, of course. But, how are they precisely measured at graduate interviews? Once again, there might be some “daylight” here between expectations and reality. Closing that gap might be the way to treat graduates more fairly.

To my way of thinking and through personal experience, I can tell that the absolute only thing the employers care for is not positive attitude, "employability skills", blablabla... That's a a waste of space and a bunch of bull. The only thing they care for is if you have a 1st or 2.1 degree. On top, they want to see if you have an MSc, MBA, etc. So for example, if I apply for a job, say, in finance or IT, and say I have an MSc, that's not enough, because they want to see your so-called pedigree. What did you get in your 1st degree, what A-levels do you have and so on and so forth. So having a + attitude and all of that is absolutely irrelevant if you ask me. They just don't care about that, maybe they do but only once you've gotten through their "prerequisites".
I remember when I was searching for graduate jobs, using monster.co.uk, which by the way never reply to your applications as does Hays,Joslinrowe, Jobserve, Toplanguagejobs, eFinancialcareers, and I saw an ad which said something like: "we are all PhD/MSc educated. If you have a 1st, are a graduate from Oxbridge, Bristol, Warwick, Imperial ONLY, then we wanna hear from you. This kind of ads are NOT few and far between, but they're all over the place, littering the sea of advertisements. They weren't even offering descent money for someone with those qualifications; it was something like £25,000 in London.

I have today applied for a trade assistant position through Hays. A couple of minutes elapsed from the time I pressed the apply tab and someone called me. He asked me whether I had a 2.1. When I said I didn't, and explained I was a working at the time(Mo-Sat) for 4 years, financially independent (not entitled to maintenance loans), married student as the reason not to have a 2.1, he asked about my A-levels. I said, as you've seen in my CV I did my schooling abroad, he said I'm sorry you are not eligible. So not only do they not care about your "employability skills", as defined by CBI, they only want britain-educated individuals, even though I have a british degree in physics and am doing an MSc in theoretical particle physics at Imperial College London.
It's little wonder, there's a MASSIVE migration of professionals out of this country and into Northamerica and Australia. I am doing that myself. I am sick and tired of elitism and cost of living in the UK; it's just not worth it. Good luck British applicants.