Graduates 'Could be Jobless For Years'

questionmaster

Theres a lack of graduates doing scence and engineering type degrees.. as ... quite frankly they are hard and require hard work and brains.

Not everyone leaving school could do a science/engineering degree... most go for 'cross-skill ' degrees. I.e languages, language+another thing, pyschology etc.

Also i guess it depends on the graduate, if you were determined you'd have been

thescouselander

SingleSue wrote: »

That is the thing I can't understand about the youngsters today, a fair few have no idea what they want to do after they leave school yet I knew exactly what I wanted to do from the age of 4!

My eldest has now finally got some sort of idea of the route he wants to take and has already picked the Uni he wants to go to...now all he has to do is get the grades in his GCSE's and then the grades at A Level. :rolleyes:

And how would a youngster know what they wanted to do? I certainly remember when I was at school and my view of the world was very different to reality. You only learn the truth when you get out in the real world and get some experience behind you.

To he honest I know a lot of adults who are unhappy with their chosen profession and still don't now what they want to do.

I think you were very lucky in knowing what you wanted to do at the age of 4 (I did too) but for most people this is not the case.

baileysbattlebus

questionmaster wrote: »

Theres a lack of graduates doing scence and engineering type degrees.. as ... quite frankly they are hard and require hard work and brains.

Not everyone leaving school could do a science/engineering degree... most go for 'cross-skill ' degrees. I.e languages, language+another thing, pyschology etc.

Also i guess it depends on the graduate, if you were determined you'd have been

I agree, a lot of people leaving school couldn't do an engineering / science type degree. But perhaps the down turn may push some of those who are capable of doing such a degree into doing one. There may be more of a future in a more technical degree than in some of the "soft" degrees.

Cleaver

thescouselander wrote: »

I think you were very lucky n knowing what you wanted to do at the age of 4 (I did too) but for most people this is not the case.

I knew exactly what I wanted to do at 4 too: be a postman. Granted, this was mainly based on Postman Pat, and at 4 you have very little concept of money and salaries and I wasn't really aware that different jobs came with different levels of money. So, suffice to say, I've never been a postman.

Having said all this, I do plan to spend at least 6 months being a postman at some point. You can't have a dream aged 4 and not fulfill it.

thescouselander

Cleaver wrote: »

I knew exactly what I wanted to do at 4 too: be a postman. Granted, this was mainly based on Postman Pat, and at 4 you have very little concept of money and salaries and I wasn't really aware that different jobs came with different levels of money. So, suffice to say, I've never been a postman.

Having said all this, I do plan to spend at least 6 months being a postman at some point. You can't have a dream aged 4 and not fulfill it.

Yeah, I see postman Pat has a helicopter now, sounds like a good job to me! No wonder the post office is struggling to turn a profit these days.

Cleaver

thescouselander wrote: »

Yeah, I see postman Pat has a helicopter now, sounds like a good job to me! No wonder the post office is struggling to turn a profit these days.

Seriously, a helicopter? Does he also do his rounds with an iPod instead of that cat, in an attempt to appeal to the yoof market?

Maybe I shouldn't work as a postman. I have visions of having a red van, saying hello to villagers, helping locals with their enquiries, walking down picturesque sunny lanes delivering hand-written postcards. The reality would probably be delivering junk mail, in the rail, to angry people at 1pm.

bo_drinker

Cleaver wrote: »

Seriously, a helicopter? Does he also do his rounds with an iPod instead of that cat, in an attempt to appeal to the yoof market?

Maybe I shouldn't work as a postman. I have visions of having a red van, saying hello to villagers, helping locals with their enquiries, walking down picturesque sunny lanes delivering hand-written postcards. The reality would probably be delivering junk mail, in the rail, to angry people at 1pm.

Even though there is a no cold callers/ junk mail sticker on the door our Pat still posts the cr4p through the door

themanbearpig

Emigration is an option for some graduates, but you still need to be a high achiever.

Those that get good degrees for from good universities (2.1 from top 20 university) at least have a shot in the market. The rest might as well quit now because they are wasting their money.

BitterAndTwisted

In a way, I blame the universities for giving a lot of young people unrealistic expectations. When I was responsible for recruiting young people for a media company, we had quite bright graduates with completely useless "Media Studies" degrees who unfortunately had no idea that what they had been studying for three years was next to useless in the real world of TV. And some of them got quite angry about what they thought were "demeaning" entry-level posts at a starting salary of about £8k. The truth is, they would have been better off leaving school at 18, worked hard and bust a gut to move up the ladder. Still, if either of their parents had a job in TV they got a job offer any way and a right pain in the a**e they often were as well

PasturesNew

baileysbattlebus wrote: »

One of the things that struck me about some young people, graduates and non graduates was often the complete lack of what I would term almost basic mathematics. I think some universities are trying to tackle this, especially for engineering and physics. It should be tackled long before then though.

I have lost count of the number of spreadsheets I have had to build where they just had to plug numbers in, because they were unable to work out themselves how to get the answer. And you had to make it so only certain cells could be used, otherwise they would decide to change something and screw the whole thing up. It was quite scary really.

I was always good at Maths ... in fact right now I am working as an Info Analyst building spreadsheets that others can't destroy, in order to collect information in a standard format, then perform what I consider to be quite basic maths on that data. As for spreadsheets, I hardly use them, but they're so straight forward and obvious to me that I can always work out what needs to be done. Having said that, I've also written training manuals for them and delivered training courses ... and supported Excel.... but I just find it easy/obvious to do 99% of what your average person could possibly ever want to do with them.

I mostly create straight forward (to me) formulae that perform the equivalent of pivot tables, yet enable me to present the information in better ways, so the exact data output can match exactly the reporting requirements.

And I feel guilty for taking their money it's so easy.