Inside the graduate recruitment market: Qualified for nothing?

Source: Exec Digital UK

Date :11/02/2008 11:53:14

The Director General of the CBI claims to speak for the majority of employers when he says graduates lack important skills. But are companies playing their part?

By John O’Hanlon

Employers, even those who have enthusiastically embraced the technology revolution within their businesses, often find it very difficult to keep up with the revolution that has taken place in education over the last couple of decades. The trouble is that senior people in the organisation bring their own set of assumptions and perspectives to the interview room, and these are based on their own experience of education. They may have attended the same university, and studied the same subjects as the people they face across that table: but often they will look in vain for the sort of common ground they may have been able to find with the people who interviewed them not so long ago.

Widening participation

In the early 1960s only six percent of under-21s went to university: by 2004 around 43 percent of 18 to 30 year-olds in England entered higher education. The UK government’s target is to get the total numbers up to 50 percent by 2010. The increase in participation has led to much discussion about whether there are now too many graduates, but as Bill Rammell, Minister for Higher Education, said in December: “We are widening participation in higher education to overcome disadvantage and unlock the talent within our society, wherever it is to be found.”

That’s great, and it sounds democratic, but employers are bound to wonder whether standards have been maintained: put starkly, the top six percent of school leavers is a more refined group than the top 55 percent – by which point many employers would think the point had been lost. As Richard Lambert, Director General of the CBI, said in a recent speech to university vice chancellors, ‘more’ has come to mean ‘less’ where graduate recruitment is concerned, and employers fear that: “The rapid increase in the number of students graduating from college or university has come at the expense of quality, in terms of knowledge, attitude and employability.”

He added that firms “are much more likely to feel that their business is being held back by shortcomings in literacy and numeracy, or by the difficulty of attracting qualified technicians or apprentices, than they are by the quantity of graduates in the workforce”.

Employability

This reactionary view of the graduate market ignores the undoubted strengths of British university education, including the traditional emphasis on research and innovation it has struggled to maintain, but in terms of employability, they are coming to terms with the fact that the elite market of 20 years ago has now given way to a mass market in which many more qualified people (on paper) are after the number of ‘graduate’ jobs on offer, which has grown much more slowly.

So what do employers really want? I asked Peter Fantom, head of Aberdeen University’s careers service for his definition of what makes a graduate employable…

Click here to read the full article on Graduate Recruitment