Overqualified & Underemployed
Step 1. Do well in high school.
Step 2. Go to university.
Step 3. Get a good job.
Step 4. Buy a house.
Step 5. Be settled and a contributing member of society by 30.
This has been drilled into millennials from all angles; our parents have told us nostalgic stories about how they purchased their first property by 25, The Simpsons (which really raised us) showed that even the lowliest employees can still reasonably afford a house.
With all this in mind how do we achieve this economic success everyone so desperately yearns for? Get a good, stable, well-paying job. Easy right? We have been doing everything we have been told we should. We are the most educated generation yet.
We should be fighting off job offers. Right?
A lot of recent graduates would laugh off that concept (whilst pouring you a flat white). The universities are trying to tell us the full time employment statistics are at a good point, so yes — this was all worth it.
They will tell us statistics like in 2015 68.8% of graduates were in full-time employment within four months of completing their degrees (Nevermind that 80.8% were in full-time employment within four months of completing their degrees in 1998).
What they don’t boast about is the reality of the job market. Yes, most likely we will get a full-time position, although that position will be less than 75% of the working male average earnings; compared to a recent graduate in 1977, which was 100%.
They also fail to mention the fact that for around 15% of us this full-time employment might not be at all related to what we have just spent a few years (and few thousand of dollars) studying.
Those hiring us were themselves hired at a point where just over half of employees held qualifications beyond school, and those who did hold a degree started the job market with a job that paid the average wage, not 15% below it (not to mention those 14 years of free higher education meant many of the baby boomers escaped a hecs debt).
Picking out figures and statistics to cry hard done by is easy. Blaming other generations for all the problems is even easier. Sitting back as computer savvy, children of the internet and blaming the baby boomers for all our future struggles isn’t helping us at all.
I doubt that the grey ceiling effect we are experiencing is because all the baby boomers really enjoy working more than traditional retirement activities like golf and sending on chain emails. Figures show that the engagement of the 54–65 age group in the labour market is rapidly growing, but that should be expected when an over populated generation comes through a labour market.
Add in a financial crisis (which we can’t really blame the entire generation for) and what we have is a whole heap of young people not getting the chance they believe they are entitled to.
While we don’t have the same job stability as generations past, great starting wages or room for promotions we are entering the most flexible and innovation labour market ever seen. Today our jobs are likely to have flexible hours where you can work at home and create content for a facebook page. Yet we expect our employment opportunities to be the exactly the same as our parents who were working with faxes.
We have different, but still relevant skills. Research out there is showing that while our career prospects aren’t identical to our parents, they are still promising and we do have skills and attributes that are attractive to a workplace.
Generation Y is not a lazy ‘now’ generation as some like to say, but in the same token, the Baby Boomers haven’t ruined the world for us. We might not graduate tomorrow to find the perfect full-time job offer sitting in the letterbox but we can make a living producing videos of ourselves sitting in our pajamas talking about how we feel about the new batman movie (and that’s pretty great).
