Tick Tock Goes The Clock

Struggling to find a job once you have graduated

It all started in secondary school. They told you that if you studied hard and diligently then you would get the GCSE’s you deserved and be able to go into sixth form or college. So you studied alongside friendships, relationships and puberty, gritting your teeth against homework and adolescence, until eventually after four years of hard work you had not only GCSE’s but A Levels. For some people the work was done, you had gained what you’d hoped (what others had told you to hope) and you had an education that could lead you tiptoeing towards a career.
Or at least that was the idea. Some split off into apprenticeships, others begun at the lowest rung of a company with a view to climb up. You and I? We went to University. Maybe we knew what we wanted from our degree, maybe we didn’t, that fact is incredibly irrelevant now. The main thing we both can agree on is that we were told, nay promised, that a degree in a suitable subject would lead to a job, and a good one at that.
Where have all the jobs gone? Were they ever there in the first place? I can’t answer that but what I can tell you is that the struggle has never been more real. Entry level jobs nowadays are asking for two to five years worth of experience and we just don’t have that. Where have we been for the last two to five years? Studying for the degree that you insisted we needed, that you promised would provide us with the skills necessary to carve ourselves a path in the career of our choosing.
To moan it isn’t fair isn’t proactive. The work experience is valued higher than most other skills nowadays and so we enthusiastically send our CV’s with their shimmering new graduate labes to as many internships as possible.However, internships don’t pay and we have thousands of pounds that we owe the government for the right to our education. It doesn’t matter that they take it bit by bit at source, not when it’s late at night and you’re adding up debt.
We’re ready to work, eager and desperate for it but we’re the most underexperienced and overqualified people in the business. We are the recent graduates and we are part of the UK’s biggest youth unemployment problem- with the figures rising by 74,000 over the last three months. With this much extra time on our hands, what else can we do but put our skills to use and write about it in our new blog?