The increase in under graduate numbers has – not unreasonably – resulted in a wholly predictable phenomenon, an increase in the number of graduates entering the labour market. Yet something seems to have gone wrong in someone’s calculations, because around a third of them can’t find work. We know that the predictions were that in future, the kind of high skill jobs needed in our economy would be best suited to graduate level workers, so how come the disparity between the number leaving university and those entering the workforce?
In part it’s a matter of timing and numbers. The issue would seem to be that recent economic spasms have slowed down the drive towards a relentlessly more able and better qualified workforce, and as the overall labour market becomes a little more testing then those without experience suffer disproportionately. So the person who pulls your pint, packs your reusable supermarket bags and tries to sell you life insurance may now be a graduate. But under-employment of our newly qualified shouldn’t knock organisations off their stride. There aren’t plenty of sparky young people simply waiting for the right opportunity. Selecting not just those with the qualifications but those with the right skills, attitudes and behaviours is no more simple in a period of over-supply than it was in a previous age when only the very few had letters after their name.
In fact it can be like hunting for a needle in a haystack, or more appropriately a diamond in the rough.
When I was in my first week of university, a professor of History welcomed me to his tutor group with the words “Welcome to the next three years, in which you will learn to read and write at degree level”. No focus on the discourse of ages past, no universal truths derived from the ancients, no standing on the shoulders of giants. Reading and writing. The literacy hour with knobs on.
It was both salutary and illuminating. I wasn’t there to learn things; I was there to learn how to learn things. If I picked up a few facts or opinions along the way, so much of a bonus, but my job was to approach ideas, thoughts and principles with a certain detached academic rigour, to become a skilled thinker, an articulate seeker after truth, a learner rather than a pupil.
So for me, the process of graduate recruitment and development needs to build on these universal outcomes from a university education.
The first lesson derived from this approach is to pretty much ignore what people have studied and focus on why and how well. Clearly, I’d quite like Doctors, Nurses, Teachers, Engineers and Lawyers to have collected a few skills along the way, but in the main, the subject studied is less important than the learning skills developed and the attitude of the individual.
The received wisdom has it that we are dealing with an enlightened bunch, expressing youthful zeal for the plight of the planet or inequalities in a global world and the need to make a difference and express themselves.
The so-called Generation Y who are both individualistic and community orientated may be true in many cases, but as a generalisation, like all such blunt characterisations it falls short of my own experience of reality. It also confuses me that we feel the need to describe a set of common characteristics for a huge slice of the population and when we do the best we can come up with is “individualistic”. There’s useful insight!
By definition, many in this group have little real life experience so things like what they did on their gap year (assuming they came from a wealthy enough family to have indulged in such a thing) and what internship they undertook (ditto on the assumption front) will give us some insight into what motivates them and how self reliant they are. If my assumptions are correct, we might also look at how hard it remains for students of limited means to graduate at all and give them credit for the application and endeavour they have shown.
But the heart of a good selection process is to put people in team environments and see how they get on. The process of action learning has long been part of the assessment centre model and I see no reason for this not to be continued. Expensive to take 50 or 60 people away for a couple or three days and see how they work together but a graduate may cost you in excess of £100,000 in training costs and salary in the first couple of years. It’s a sizable investment and an expensive one to get wrong.
Within that development centre, we want to create tasks which will look at how well they have learned things or can learn things - group exercises and activities which require them to understand a little more about us and about how we do business and the kinds of activities we’re engaged in. Now in a good organisation, this kind of knowledge acquisition in advance of an action based learning activity would be delivered online. Why not for a development centre or initial graduate recruitment? We have a group of potential employees who – for the most part - live a significant portion of their lives in cyberspace (different from being cyber space cadets – identify them and weed them out would be my advice) and if we have already created online resources for other induction or on-boarding purposes, a re-use would be a relatively low cost, if not cost free option.
This requires a clear understanding of the skills, attitudes and behaviours that would make the most difference to the organisation. Do we want me-too corporate clones or have we looked at skill gaps and identified a need for an injection of fresh ideas, new thinking and different behaviours? Sometimes the outcome of an organisation’s learning needs analysis can be a course menu designed to fit square pegs in round holes. Why not identify which shaped holes we have and fill them with the appropriate graduate-sized peg?
And given that we are taking on someone who has learning skills and a clear need to be polished and shaped to meet the changing expectations of the modern organisation, what role do they play in articulating their own training needs and their aspirations as learners? This begs a whole series of questions. How much they know about what is expected in the roles to which they are being recruited? How aware are they of their own areas of strength and weakness and how honest are they about these? Are they hungry to learn or do they think they know it all (this is not ‘The Apprentice’ after all, thank god)? Is there an appropriate graduate training scheme in place and how adaptable is the combination of on the job experience, coaching and formal development in meeting the needs of individuals?
Putting these valuable stars of our future firmament in situations where the way we would want them to approach their own development in the future is modelled, seems to be a great opportunity and a potential driver for much needed cultural change.
