Oops! Bit behind with my blog posts in 2010, sorry! I’ve lots of great excuses for this of course, but I won’t bore you with them!

So my main day job is recruiting quantity surveyors, but at the moment I’m also working with some final year business school students at a university on the outskirts of London. It’s a pilot scheme on employability which I’ll tell you about it in more detail some other time, but over the last couple of months I’ve been spending two days a week meeting students, staff and so on.

Now the public sector is a bit of a change of pace for me and, I won’t lie, I find it highly frustrating at times! But the first time I met some of the students it really clicked for me and I totally get it now. They make it all worthwhile! The kids (I call them kids but, of course, they’re 20/21 so hardly kids! In fact, it’s just occurred to me how patronising that is so I’m going to stop calling them that starting from now!) The students are great – they are polite, articulate young adults who are passionate about their subjects and are working their butts off to get the best degrees they can. They know the job market isn’t great and they are worried about what’s going to happen to them after they graduate, but they’ve got so much work to do before graduation that it’s just not that high on their radar.

It’s been really interesting to see the different stages they’re all at. The common feeling amongst university staff is that most of the students have part-time jobs already but, while some do, I haven’t found this to be true on the whole. In fact, I’ve met some students who have never held any kind of employment, ever; some who don’t have CVs; and some who don’t even know what covering letters are! And this has really got me thinking – there is just so much pressure on the younger generation these days!

When I was young (after the days of black and white television, but before the days of the iPods) you got a job as soon as you could. Whether it was a paper round, a waitressing job, or working in a shop, everyone was at it, so by the time you entered the world of full-time work it wasn’t really that much of a shock to the system. At 15 I was (possibly illegally, with hindsight…) working weekends in a cafe and, with the exception of some periods while I was backpacking, I have always held a job since. In fact, it was really only five years ago when I moved in with Mr J that I stopped having a full-time job and a part-time job on top of that too. These days it doesn’t seem to work like that though and the more students I meet, the more I understand this. Because it’s not just about how good your degree is these days, for some graduate schemes you also have to have the right number of UCAS points to even be considered. So really, once your GCSEs are out the way, you’d better knuckle down if you want to get the right kind of graduate job when you’re 21/22!

What pressure! When did we start being so tough on our kids? When did we stop valuing work/life experience and start focusing so heavily on academia? And how can we possibly expect 15/16 year olds to know what they want to do five or six years down the line, particularly when they don’t know anything about the working world?! I met one girl who’s wanted to be a family law solicitor since she was 13. What amazing focus and passion she has! How amazing that she has always known what she wanted to do! But law is highly competitive and for her dream to become a reality she’s had to work non-stop since her GCSEs. With the exception of the odd week of work experience, she’s never had a job – she’s never had time. Because there are those of us who are able to get a first class honours degree with relative ease, and there are those of us who have to bury our heads in our books solidly for three years in the hope of even getting a 2:1.

On one hand, meeting the students has been a scary business: The starting point for helping them to find jobs is way before where I expected it would be. But on the other hand I totally understand their quandary and I feel as though there’s so much more we need to do for them. “We” the educational establishments, “we” the potential employers, “we” the parents.

Now. Where to start…?

You can visit my blog at http://wendyjacob.wordpress.com