JPMorgan vs Deliveroo — Why choosing a career path should be about more than just prestige
Whilst we were doing market research in the run up to the launch of JamieAi, myself and our co-founder Willoughby spent a lot of time travelling around to various universities across the UK in order to talk to students and get their perspective on what it’s like trying to move from university, into a full time role after graduation. We were fortunate enough to chat with students who were willing and able to talk expansively and insightfully about the challenges that they faced when looking to move from academia into the world of work.
What struck me most coming out of these conversations, was the relative lack of sector-diversity that students were engaging with, or were being engaged by at university.
At every university, the same handful of firms and companies were interacting with students — the problem this creates is that often students don’t know what all their options are. If you have a STEM background, it’s more than likely that either the bulge-bracket banks or the big consultancy firms are very much on your radar (their presence on campus is such that, how could they not be?)
The issue with this is that, whilst many of those firms and companies are fantastic places to work, they may not suit everyone. We’ve met graduates who would thrive in a corporate environment, at say a large hedge-fund for example: we’ve also met graduates, with the same skills and same academic background who would be much more suited to working remotely from a beach in California, perhaps for a robo-investor.
The problem is, smaller companies (and that’s not just limited to start ups) cannot compete on-campus with larger companies. We spoke with many students who expressed their frustration that they didn’t know where else they could go or where else their skills could take them and that this wasn’t being remedied or addressed.
In the current climate, candidates from a STEM background are sought after not only by companies in consultancy, finance and engineering; but also by start-ups, charities, clothing brands, retailers and pretty much every other sector you might be able to think of — Apple are competing for the same graduates as ASOS, Deutsche Bank for the same talent as Deliveroo. Because companies are willing to compete so fiercely for good graduate talent, what often happens is that those companies with the loudest voices (i.e the most widely known brand or the deepest pockets) invariably come out on top: this then evolves into a feeling among many student bodies that these places carry the most prestige, and are therefore, de dicto, the most desirable places to work.
At JamieAi we want to change that: we recognise that the pool of graduates is far more diverse than the current range of companies they have access to. We want to shatter the perception that certain firms are “better” to work for as a graduate because we believe this is a subjective not an objective assessment.
Real damage can be done by making the wrong choice without enough information too early on in your career, one of the reasons we started building JamieAi was to level this playing field.
Students would also often say that the reason they’d applied to the companies they’d applied to, was based purely on perceived prestige and the fact that they themselves were already aware of those particular organisations. I personally think, that choosing a job should be based on whether the work interests you, on whether the work you do has a tangible impact, on whether you’re a cultural fit: the list goes on but the point is this — as a graduate, shouldn’t you be looking for more than just “prestige” on your CV, and after all, what even is prestige?
