2013-05-24T06:50:14-04:00 Charlie Ball http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=charlie-ball Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Charlie Ball Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.3107007 2013-04-18T05:14:42-04:00 2013-04-18T08:42:10-04:00

Charlie Ball http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charlie-ball/ Graduate Market Trends I've been looking back at HESA Destination of Leavers of Higher Education surveys for the last five years and it's revealed some interesting insight into where graduates have actually been finding jobs.

London has been consistently the most common first employment destination for new graduates, but had seen a relative decline in share of employment before the recession. Since then the capital's share has increased and continues to rise. Scotland, by contrast, has experienced a year-on-year fall while the East of England has seen steady rises in the share of new graduates for the last five years.

Not all jobs are found equally spread across all parts of the UK, and students who aspire to work in particular regions need to work closely with well-connected local careers services to ensure that they don't have unrealistic expectation of the kind of work that is available locally.

For example, two thirds of financial analysts began their career in London, only South-East England and Scotland saw more than one in twenty financial analysis jobs.

Conversely marketing and advertising executives had a less concentrated jobs market with 38% based in London, one in ten employed in the North West, and Surrey, Merseyside, Oxfordshire, Hampshire and Manchester all provided at least 40 jobs. Mechanical engineers were also spread across the UK with less concentration in London, so graduates entering this field should expect to work away from more conventional graduate job hotspots.

The jobs market for software engineers is interesting, and quite unusual. Almost one in four started their career in London and another 16% in the South East, but the most common city outside London for this group to start work was Belfast and they were almost all from Northern Irish institutions and they had found out about jobs through careers service. So, although there appears to have been a reasonable jobs market for software engineers in Belfast, in practise, it is probably less accessible to graduates who are not educated locally.

Pharmacy is another profession where careers services are rather more likely than average to be cited by graduates as the place where they found out about the job, and this may help graduates to find roles throughout the country. London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Leicester, Belfast, Leeds, Hertfordshire, Essex, Lancashire, Newcastle and Kent were all popular places for these pharmacists to find work last year.

Overall, there are a lot of good jobs outside the capital, but London is the only place where you can get a job in pretty much anything available to graduates. The jobs market in places like Manchester and Edinburgh is diverse, but the range and volume of roles is much smaller.

A lot of graduates struggle to find work because they limit themselves by looking for a particular kind of job in a certain part of the country. Unfortunately, our jobs market often doesn't work like that. So, if you're sure you want to do a particular job, make sure you know where those jobs are to reduce the chance of aiming for something that simply isn't there.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2588025 2013-01-31T03:45:44-05:00 2013-04-01T05:12:01-04:00

Charlie Ball http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charlie-ball/
But, how strong is the evidence from these reports? What conclusions can be drawn? Can the starting salaries for graduates really be over £25,000? If you see a job offering £20,000, should you just turn it down as being just too low?

High Fliers interviews the companies that makes up the current Times Top 100 Employers, a survey which asks finalists from certain universities which companies they'd like to work for and then draws up a list of the most popular employers from that data. These companies are then surveyed about their recruitment last year and how they expect things to go this year. As you'd imagine with that selection method, the companies tend to be large, well-known, London-based organisations offering very good salaries, particularly in the finance industry. Investment banking, a role that approximately 0.1% of last year's graduates took up, is particularly strong represented. As a result, you get an estimate of starting salaries for these companies of about £29,000.

This winter's AGR survey covers 197 recruiters that mainly operate large graduate training schemes. 61% of this year's survey respondents had one recruitment round, and only 2% actually recruit ad hoc. These are generally large, well-resourced recruiters with a planned graduate intake. This is reinforced by the finding that each of the AGR companies surveyed expects to take, on average, around 109 graduates on this year. Many of the companies surveyed in the AGR report are also surveyed in High Fliers, but with a broader base to draw on, the average salaries predicted are £26,500.

Both surveys provide a useful picture of a range of popular graduate job options, and if you want to work for a blue-chip graduate recruiter, probably in London, on a formal training scheme, these surveys will help inform your decision.

High Fliers has covered some interesting issues about work experience - many of the high profile employers surveyed recruit largely from the people they've sponsored or given sandwich years to over the course of their degree, and if you didn't get in on those schemes when you started university, you're at a big disadvantage. That's a move that has implications for the way we plan our careers.

The AGR survey explores the live news issue about school-leaver apprenticeship routes into graduate employers that some commentators think could signal the end of the need to go to university for young professionals. This idea gets rather short shrift from recruiters who point out that this move is to cover skills shortages in different areas and provides another route from graduate schemes.

Both surveys seem to agree that employers expect a modest improvement in the state of the economy - or at least the part of it that needs graduates - this year. These are important and useful pieces of information for young people alarmed and confused about the state of the jobs market and the messages they are getting from all sorts of sources.

But most graduates don't work in London, and most graduates don't work for these companies. These surveys do not represent the actual lived experience of most people who ever have or ever will go to university. They are interesting for all that, and they can give us a lot of useful information, but only about a certain part of the jobs market.

The reality for the majority of graduates this year is that their average starting salary will be about £20,000 - lower outside London. Most new graduates will get jobs, and will not get them on large graduate training schemes, but with small businesses and local firms - both public and private sector employers that are not covered by these surveys. It's ok to start your career on less that £20,000 in a small office somewhere outside London. Most people do, and it's a good way to start your career, get some experience under your belt and get thinking about what you really want to do.

www.hecsu.ac.uk]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1215389 2012-01-24T19:00:00-05:00 2012-03-25T05:12:01-04:00

Charlie Ball http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charlie-ball/
No.

Firstly, if you check the text, 48% of the Times Top 100 employers say it is 'quite' or 'very' likely that a graduate with no work experience would get a job offer at interview. Yes, you read that right. 48 of the employers in the Times Top 100 think that graduates with absolutely no work experience at all stand a decent chance of getting a job with them - better than I thought as well.

Secondly, they don't say what that work experience needs to be. Work experience is almost always valuable. Obviously, there's a difference between a year's work placement at a busy business, and a holiday job pulling pints. Because in the latter, you're dealing with customers directly, often having to use good negotiation and interpersonal skills, and direct experience of managing company cash. And that's just off the top of my head. I'm sure the year's work placement will also be useful. In short, working gives you useful skills and it's a question of learning to translate those skills into the language spoken by business HR departments.

Thirdly, this is not new, and it is quite a long way from being new. If you are about to leave university and are unaware that work experience is not the single most useful thing you can have on your CV, then the best I can say is that I am rather surprised and that you ought to get down to your local university careers service. Run!

Work experience is immensely valuable to job seekers. Without it, your CV looks rather thin and you'll need something impressive to replace it. Great voluntary experience, for example, or a real track record of organising activities and events at university.

And don't let's forget that although this research is interesting and relevant to the large number of graduates chasing these very sought after positions, most graduates don't work for these companies. Small and medium businesses make up 40% of graduate recruitment, and the proportion is rising. It's always worth considering them as an option.

But the real message to take from this new research is that, whilst work experience is vitally important, and the jobs market is tight, no matter what other news you might be reading, the outlook for new and upcoming graduates is far from hopeless. Things may even be improving. Most graduates this year will get jobs. Most who do will get graduate level jobs. And, there's no avoiding it, work experience will help.]]>