Graduate Employment.

[Josem]

In the STTF [censored] thread, I just made these posts that might be relevant to others interested in graduate employment (ie, employment immediately after finishing university/college). While they're written by me here in Australia, I assume they're broadly transferable to other Western countries.

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Do you think it's bad that I never really had any work experience before and that I'm 21?

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I assume that would be fairly unusual in most Western countries.

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I never worked a job before besides playing poker.

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I used to serve as a director of a company that ran a Careers & Employment service (both casual/part-time and also graduate emploment) for an Australian university.

Our research found that the key attributes* that Australian employers considered when employing recent graduates were:

1) Good marks

2) History of work (vacation, part-time, etc.)

3) Involvement in extra-curricular activities

Be aware, however, that this was only relevant for the first post-degree job. After that, the employer's value of these university activities decreased very, very quickly.

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Will that affect me once I graduate with my bussiness degree?

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Yes - but there is an obvious solution to fix this - get some work doing something. The precise nature of the work isn't overly important, as the difference between someone with work experience and without work experience is much larger than the difference between relevant work experience (working in finance or whatever) and any work experience (working at McDonalds or whatever)

*this excludes other attributes such as communication skills, problem solving, etc., which aren't so easily developed on a resume

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What you mean by good marks?

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It really depends on the employee demand of particular companies. The most sought-after employers are going to require higher marks than less sought-after employers.

Some employers just look at an average mark. Some employers discard applicants who have failed more than x subjects (with x sometimes being 0). Different firms have different practices.

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Do you think it's true that alot of stuff taught in colleges aren't going to be even used in your career.

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Yes, I think that's true. Hell, I have a degree in Policy Studies, and now work as a political adviser. I can't think of anything substantial off the top of my head that I learnt in the academic classroom that has any relevance to my role.

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So it's not even your education that is helping you but the training you get from the company to be able to preform your job?

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I believe that the most important thing to learn at college/university/education in general is not so much the academic material, but demonstrating to potential employers that you're able to invest time and effort now for a future improvement down the track.

That's a key indicator of emotional intelligence, and shows that you can figure out that delayed gratification is a good thing.


During the last Australian recession (in the early 1990s), a successful small business owner that I knew very well (I was only 11 or 12 at the time) had advertised a job. He received something in the order of 600 applications for this one role.

The first step of the hiring process was to discard all those applications that did not have a degree. This wasn't because the work was inherently dependent upon the technical education of a tertiary degree, but because this employer saw that having a degree was a highly likely indicator of a series of other attributes - self-discipline to do your work independently, the ability to think critically, and the ability to manage yourself.


That lesson stuck with me, and I think is something that has impressed on me later in life that it is not so much the academic education that is important, but the other attributes that typically associate themselves with such people. I'm convinced that when I was at uni, I learnt many, many, many times more stuff outside the classroom than in it.

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If no one showed you how the job is done then it's going to be pretty hard figuring out for yourself. I guess this wouldn't work if your trying to be an engineer though without any education but I think if someone showed you how to do it over and over you woudln't need much of an education to be able to do whatever engineering people do? Does that make any sense hahah?

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Yes, it does make sense. But the other key outcome out of our research into graduate employer demands is that they don't actually expect graduates to be able to do the job when they walk out of university and into their first full-time employment*.

There was some media coverage of this and other research at the time, and it's actually quite comical. Employers realise that academia largely does a poor job of developing the actual "on-the-job" skills. That's why many graduate employer roles involve significant amounts of training, mentoring, and so on.


*This applied to non-technical roles. Obviously, dental employers expected graduate dentists to have a good understanding of dentistry, and bridge builders expected graduate engineers to understand the basics of engineering.

Throughout this post, I've used the words "typically" and "generally" a lot. That's because although those generalisations apply "typically" and "generally" they obviously are not absolute rules. There are plenty of morons with degrees; and there are plenty of truly excellent people without them.

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