We had
lunch with friends yesterday and the conversation touched on the baby
boomers. I remembered writing this blog
last year but didn’t post it. Perhaps I
felt it was a rant and should probably rest for a while. Having read it again – I think it is
well-rested now, still a bit ranty, but here it is....
If anyone else
tells me that the baby boomers were so lucky I will scream and scream until I
am sick! I can tell you some of the things we didn’t have:
We didn’t
take gap years – we went straight from school to further education or to
work. We got “jobs” – you went into work
in the morning and came home at the end of the day and got paid. Sometimes you
didn’t get paid very much, especially if you were being trained. Sometimes the jobs were really, really boring
– making tea, running errands and doing the drudge work that someone higher up
the pecking order didn’t want to do - and sometimes there were no promotion
prospects let alone a career path.
But you
still plodded on. There was no safety net so if you wanted to eat, pay the
rent, let alone get married and have children (ah so old-fashioned), you did
what you needed to do, tried to get as much experience as possible so that when
something better came along you could grab it. And sometimes you couldn’t take
those opportunities. I was a PA in a
leading advertising agency, my boss told me that they had made a decision to
hire their first female trainee account executive (Oh yes, those were the days)
and suggested I apply for the job. I was very excited until I realized that it
would mean halving my salary – and as my husband was studying that was out of
the question – a missed opportunity but you did what you had to do.
Unemployed, unemployable?
There was
an article in the Evening Standard last year about a school leaver who applied
for 3,000 jobs over 15 months and failed to get a job. She had neither skills,
nor qualifications nor could I find any kind of experience. Why should anyone
look at her once, let alone twice?
This
means that this young woman sent off on average 10 applications a day five days
a week. How targeted is that? I have had
those sorts of applications, not only from school leavers but graduates and
people with experience and they start “To whom it may concern....”, the name of
the organisation was often wrong and sometimes they mentioned another
organisation altogether. Why should I,
or anyone, read through to the end? The
internet is available – do the research.
If this is what young people are being encouraged to do they are being
failed miserably.
By the time
my Number One Daughter went to university she had done a number of things that
would have interested me as an employer.
She and two school friends took on two paper rounds between them. Two of the three did both rounds together and
the third had a lie-in – each of them therefore had a lie-in every third day. (Ingenuity
✓ Commitment ✓ will turn up on time ✓); she had a Saturday job in a
shop (reliable✓ customer service ✓). While at university she worked at times as a
domestic cleaner, washing up in a Mexican restaurant (never ate refried beans
again) and sold books off a market stall.
She is
now highly educated with a senior job – but all along the way the mindless jobs
without a future have ticked a number of boxes that would have counted with or
without a university education and speak volumes to a prospective employer.
She is
not alone – many of my friends and former colleagues did seasonal work in factories,
in shops, on building sites, in hospitals and on farms – those same jobs that
are now being done by people coming here from other EU countries.
Doing
things that “look good on a CV” are not just for graduates. An employer faced with a number of unskilled,
unqualified applicants is desperate to find something that will indicate
whether this person will stay the course, turn up on time, do a day’s work (and
that means a day’s work not hours here and there in between texting and
checking facebook) and pitch up again tomorrow and the next day.
My
early involvement with people seeking work experience to complete their
qualifications was interesting. Our
first candidate worked hard, never said no to anything and we offered him a
trainee position when he qualified (fancy word for gofer.....) and is now Head
of IT (and still sings a mean karaoke). The second had nails that were so long
they curved around under her fingers. It
did not seem to impede her using her mobile phone which she did a lot but did
hamper her typing and other tasks. We pointed this out to her but she said that
she wasn’t prepared to cut them and we never saw her again.
As a post-script: I know that the current climate
is different; the job market is difficult and that there are many talented and
qualified young people who are unable to find work but sometimes you have to do
the grunt work before you can follow your dream.
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