Graduates who are struggling to find work need to learn how to sell themselves to employers and change their game plan if they are serious about finding work, says a leading careers and recruitment expert.
Responding to yesterday’s news that unemployment among graduates in England and Wales is at its highest in almost two decades, Paul MacKenzie-Cummins, one of the UK’s leading careers experts and director of Newport-based MacKenzie-Cummins PR - a public relations firm specialising in the recruitment industry, said that today’s graduates lack the know-how to get a job.
“Competition for jobs among graduates is more intense than at any stage since 1993, with an average of 69 applications per graduate job,” he said. “But many graduates continue to put their chance are job success in jeopardy by their inability to make themselves stand out from the crowd.
“With most large-scale graduate employers having scaled down their annual intake of newly qualified graduates over the last two years combined with the recently announced cut of some 490,000 public sector jobs over the next five years, the prospects for graduates looking for their first steps on the career ladder seem to be muted at best,” said MacKenzie-Cummins.
“But they can improve their prospects by understanding what employers are really looking for and marking themselves accordingly.”
According to MacKenzie-Cummins, looking for a job is an exercise in marketing whereby the product (the job seeker) must match the requirements that the buyer (the employer) is looking for. Employers don’t want to read a never-ending list of skills on a CV; they want the CV to answer one simple question: What will this person do for my business?
“Graduate applicants need to demonstrate that they have as many of the key skills needed for the role they are applying for by bring them to life. So instead of listing what is little more than a set of adjectives, explain how you have used these skills in a work situation,” said MacKenzie-Cummins.
“Some of these skills could have been gained through non-work related activities or during a work experience placement - you are selling your ‘potential’ not necessarily your ‘proven’ ability.”
Yesterday the Higher Education Careers Services Unit (HECSU) revealed that graduate unemployment is at its highest in 17 years at 8.9 per cent. Their report, entitled What Do Graduates Do?, found that over the last year, graduate unemployment has risen by a further 21,020 students who graduated in 2009 and were known to be without work in January 2010. The last time it reached this level was 1993 (10.5 per cent).
