The Employment Gulf
December 1st 2006 07:45
In recent times since ditching my previous job to go travelling around Europe I have discovered that there is an employment gulf for educated graduates with limited work experience. I have only worked for a couple of years, but find myself struggling to find work both in New Zealand and when I was in London.
People say get any job to gain experience and money, but many employers like supermarkets, fast food outlets and chain stores often overlook well educated people because they assume that they will be quickly snapped up by other employers. Those with higher scale jobs to offer think that this person doesn't have the runs on the board to be employed.
It creates a gulf between a rock and a hard place, where many graduates with standard degrees like BA, BCom find themselves. I am not alone with this. I know many other graduates who despite working manual jobs during their University holidays, struggle to get a foot in the door of a noral graduate job.
This creates a new class of unemployed person with better education than their Case Managers as they claim the benefit and definitely higher prospects than their dole colleagues who they must do seminars and courses with.
This begs the question, is it worth going to University to study without having set vocation in mind. I studied Human Geography because it was interesting, but this along with marketing didn't lead to anything specialised. This took six years, yet nurses who couldn't get into University but instead went to Polytech walk into employent in three years. Another example of a strange situation was when I was working on the front counter at the Dunedin City Council, taking plans of proposed building work to be done for a Building Consent. People with very little education would come in and be unable to fill out the form, yet they were the one in the money, undertaking hundreds of thousands of dollars in building work for mega profit.
So manual type jobs are not as frowned upon as I always was told growing up. In fact quite the contrary. There is a huge demand for development and this begs the question. Is tertiary study in generic degrees really worthwhile?
People say get any job to gain experience and money, but many employers like supermarkets, fast food outlets and chain stores often overlook well educated people because they assume that they will be quickly snapped up by other employers. Those with higher scale jobs to offer think that this person doesn't have the runs on the board to be employed.
It creates a gulf between a rock and a hard place, where many graduates with standard degrees like BA, BCom find themselves. I am not alone with this. I know many other graduates who despite working manual jobs during their University holidays, struggle to get a foot in the door of a noral graduate job.
This creates a new class of unemployed person with better education than their Case Managers as they claim the benefit and definitely higher prospects than their dole colleagues who they must do seminars and courses with.
This begs the question, is it worth going to University to study without having set vocation in mind. I studied Human Geography because it was interesting, but this along with marketing didn't lead to anything specialised. This took six years, yet nurses who couldn't get into University but instead went to Polytech walk into employent in three years. Another example of a strange situation was when I was working on the front counter at the Dunedin City Council, taking plans of proposed building work to be done for a Building Consent. People with very little education would come in and be unable to fill out the form, yet they were the one in the money, undertaking hundreds of thousands of dollars in building work for mega profit.
So manual type jobs are not as frowned upon as I always was told growing up. In fact quite the contrary. There is a huge demand for development and this begs the question. Is tertiary study in generic degrees really worthwhile?
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