The Lost Generation: prospects after graduating

by Chloe Shuff

In this year’s graduate job market, one thing is for sure: competition will be fierce. University leavers face a daunting climate of uncertainty and unrest. But while graduates these days find their educational raft much more unstable than those before and with no guarantee it will keep them afloat, those without a degree wade out into the increasingly choppy ocean of the job market without even a pair of wellies.

In a recent government survey, the figures are surprisingly encouraging. Of all those who graduated from UK universities six months ago, overall around 66 per cent have taken jobs in the UK and abroad. Everything is fine, on paper, but does this bear any relation to the reality of what’s ­likely to emerge from universities in the near future.

Recent graduate, Andrew Hankinson’s article The Lost Generation featured in The Observer this January, bemoaned the appalling state of this generation’s job prospects, griping “how graduates are picking up the tabs for their parents’ lives.”

At the time of writing and looking at his parents, Hankinson found himself turning to the previous generation for blame.

“Baby boomers had free education, affordable houses, fat pensions, early retirement and second homes (150,000 at the last census), but when we got to the buffet table – oh look, a couple of manhandled sandwiches. I amassed student debt in the belief that graduation would be followed by a huge bubble bath filled with sexy young jobs and beautiful, cigar-smoking status symbols. Not joblessness.”

His bitterness is completely understandable. After all, we are the student debt generation, and the first of its kind. But when I caught up with Hankinson in the months following the article, he had landed a job as an in-house journalist on a major newspaper, and seemed to have fulfilled the government’s ‘66 per cent’ statistic. I asked him what advice he would have for those graduates who are now in the position he was in six months ago. “Many of you won’t get jobs. You won’t be able to afford a house. You have huge debts from an education that others got for free. People are calling your degrees worthless. Clearly you’re not shouting loudly enough and you’re not fighting hard enough. Stop being doormats.”

This is almost enough to convince me that perhaps it is all down to frame of mind. Perhaps the best attitude is to look positively at the many opportunites that are available to us, to ‘go with the flow’ and seek out opportunity.

The paths our careers and lives take are unique, very often surprising and always unpredictable. Increasing numbers of graduates are choosing to take up the freelance life as a serious and permanent choice. Although this can mean sporadic income and little security.

Those with an adventurous streak may consider taking up study or work overseas. Graduates who take a gap year could find that part-time work abroad improves their CV, and the rich variety of experience gained from travelling can be invaluable.

This generation’s job-seekers have many advantages that the previous generation could not dream of. The internet is the new frontier for the job market. The explosion in popularity of social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook mean that employers are finding new and imaginative ways to advertise, if you know where to look.

Useful websites for graduates

• UAL’s Creative Careers service:  providing information and links on where to find jobs, further training and study resources, and general careers and creative opportunities relating to your chosen subject.

• Prospects: ‘The UK’s official graduate careers site’. Holds information on all aspects of careers, job seeking and further study. Also offers direct access to courses and employer vacancies across many types of occuptions. Also, look for ‘country specific information’ to find a comperehensive guide to studying and working abroad in over 50 countries.

• Get: ‘graduate jobs, independent career advice and a community of job hunters.’

• Findamasters: a database of taught and research Masters courses in the UK.

• Jobmob: sign up for 400+ Twitter feeds of job openings both UK and International.

• Artsjobs: arts Council England’s mailing list detailing vacancies, internships and opportunities. There is also a Facebook application and Twitter.