Burger Flipping – it’s not rocket science

To illustrate the importance of gaining a university education (somewhat tongue in cheek), my grandfather used to tell us a story of when he was in the war, and on the first day in his new regiment the commanding officer lined up the troops and barked out: “Do any of you have a degree in mathematics?” One of his colleagues nervously raised his arm, to which the officer replied, “Right! You! Count the men!” And so his colleague was deemed qualified to count the men based on the three years he’d spent pouring over the complexities of multi-dimensional geometry, differential calculus and operational research.

Last year the CIPD published figures that showed that around 60% of graduates were in jobs that they were overqualified for. Similarly, recent research from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) showed that over 60,000 graduates were in “non-professional” roles, working in areas like office administration, sales and customer service, and that 16,700 were out of work six months after leaving university.

 

Exam season is close upon us, and for our undergraduates and A Level students, it’s going to be an ‘interesting’ couple of months ahead. But what they face at the other end of the proverbial tunnel seems to get more uncertain as each year passes.

Now, let’s not forget that we’ve just come out of an excruciating recession and so, many grads will have taken any job they could so as to get a foothold in the jobs market – and of course this gives them important experience that can help them achieve promotion into bigger and better things in the future. Also, many will have part time jobs (which may or may not have involved flipping the occasional burger or stocking the odd shelf here or there) that helped them fund their studies, which they carry on doing afterwards until something more substantive comes along.

But I think the truth behind the figures is a lot more worrying. In an overcrowded job market, employers are using increasingly blunter selection criteria for screening out candidates, and insisting that only grads need apply – or indeed only those with specific grades and/or from specific universities, and from what we see, there are two main reasons for this:

Government campaigns to get more and more people into university has led to a glut of graduates, not all of whom with particularly good grades, and many in subjects that are meaningless to employers. Add to this the historically high unemployment generally – which has admittedly started to improve, and, by simple supply and demand economics, when there are more candidates in the job market companies can be more fussy about who they hire. And that’s before anyone starts blaming the immigrants.

But unfortunately, the main reason more and more employers are asking for grads is the inadequacy of A levels as a means of preparing students for work. In fact, even universities are having to introduce “foundation years” (an extra year at the beginning of the degree) because A level students haven’t been properly prepared for Higher Education either.

[Please note: I’ve deliberately put the blame on the A level qualification and not the students themselves. Obviously each student is different and each has their own ability/suitability for further study or for the world of work, regardless of the exams they pass].

Obviously, many jobs in the professions (accountancy, medicine, law etc) and other specialisms will always require a degree – although nowadays they’re often more concerned with where the degree was from than which subject it was in, but even employers from other fields are using the degree qualification as a benchmark of numeracy, literacy and general business nouse.

I have to admit I do follow this logic somewhat. Why should employers like Tescos have to train their staff in basic numeracy and literacy so that they can do their job? They’d rather hire someone who’s been in education for a bit longer and has a grasp of basic employability skills than take a risk on a teenager. But why should employers have to rely on universities to give students these skills – why aren’t they being taught in Sixth Form?

Don’t get me wrong, even raw grads aren’t always ‘work-ready’ and often lack core employability skills (unless they’ve spent time doing an internship of some sort). But what they will have gained is a tremendous amount of autonomy, a more critical/analytical approach to their work and a fundamental understanding that working hard (or studying hard as the case may be) pays off – assuming they’ve got the grades to prove it.

So, whilst I acknowledge that you don’t need a degree in astrophysics to flip a burger (or count soldiers for that matter), saying that a grad is “overqualified” to do a particular job isn’t always fair. For example, most retailers make their graduate recruits work on the shop floor as part of their induction training, and so starting out ‘on the tills’ can often be a first foot on the proverbial ladder. I’ve heard of many stories of grads taking their part time/holiday work further into management and beyond once they have their degree.

I’m a grad, and I studied a subject that bears very little resemblance to what I do now – I studied Physiology and got my first job with a pharmaceutical company but then I moved into pharmaceutical recruitment and have stayed in the recruitment industry ever since. But I never cease to be surprised when skills (not necessarily the specific knowledge) that I picked up during my studies (teamwork, data analysis, critical thinking, giving presentations) come into play in the work I do now. I don’t think I utilized all of these skills in my very first job, but I’m sure that over time I could pick out other things that I can trace back to my time at uni.

In fact, it’s often the case that employers do not look for grads with the obvious degrees to their respective sector. Accountants would rather recruit a Maths grad than a Business & Finance grad, lawyers would often rather hire a humanities grad than a legal grad – they’ll have to get the additional ACCA or LLB anyway. I can’t say how many students I’ve spoken to who graduated with degrees in subjects like Hospitality Management who found that they would have spent their time much more productively actually working in a hotel and not studying at all.

On the subject of unnecessary qualifications, I’ve spoken to a number of candidates who have studied for a course under the promise they were sold (or mis-sold) that employers would be clamoring to hire them once they’d qualified. Training courses that make this sort of promise should be treated with caution, and you’d want to find out a lot more detail about the sort of jobs their leavers go into and how long they stay in them (I’ve heard of so called ‘colleges’ that would pitch its students into unpaid internships so that they could sell the fact that a high percentage of people with the qualification it was offering found ‘work’ afterwards).

In the post How To Be A Grad – and win, I made the point that if you’re going to get a degree, you shouldn’t just rely on getting the grade and expecting the job offers to flood in – you’ll be competing in a global grad market and will need to make sure your CV stands out from the rest in order to stand a chance of success.

In this post, I’ve tried to redress that balance and show that you don’t always need a degree to get the job you want, and that sometimes, spending those three or four years working will be better off for you in the long-run than spending that time studying.

I’m not saying that getting a degree isn’t worthwhile – it will undoubtedly improve your job prospects. I’m just saying that it’s not something that’s worthwhile doing badly. If it’s not something you’re ready for it’s not the end of the world, and you don’t need to spend the rest of your life flipping burgers or stacking shelves or doing whatever it is you do in your first job just because you don’t have one.

One of the greatest frustrations I have when I attend careers fairs in schools and colleges is speaking to school pupils who have greater aspirations for themselves than their teachers or parents do – both academically and in their careers. It’s often said that poor social mobility in this country is such that, to quote the former Education Secretary Michael Gove, “rich thick kids do better than poor clever children.” But to my mind that’s only because parents and teachers set them low expectations, perhaps because they’re frightened of them doing better than they did. Students need the support and reassurance that if they work hard and aim high, they will be successful. Sure, they may need to flip a few burgers along the way, but it’s worth it in the long-run.