October 2006 – The changing face of graduate aspirations

A regular autumn job for the past few years has been to outline then pull together various articles for the FT’s annual graduate recruitment supplement. Looking at the various statistics - starting salaries, numbers of vacancies, numbers of graduates – it’s difficult year-on-year to perceive any radical change.

But if you talk to recruiters, managers and the graduates themselves, and if you stand back and try to view the broader working landscape, where formal graduate recruitment represents only one avenue for shifting people out of the education system and in to work, changes or, at the very least, perceptions of change, begin to emerge.

One phenomenon that is beginning to trouble recruiters is what Tom Mason, managing director of Hudson Solutions, part of the Hudson human resources group called “the check-out culture.” This refers to graduates who look for alternatives to the typical graduate job, either by travelling the world or in setting up their own businesses.

The same point was raised over lunch with Robert Walters, founder of the recruitment business that shares his name. In a discussion that bordered on one between grumpy old men stereotypes, we both agreed that today’s youth wanted it all, straight away and preferably with the work taken out. But underpinning the grumbles that “it’s not the same as it was in our day” was a general observation that some graduates, sometimes highly qualified individuals, are less than enamoured with big company graduate programmes.

Up to the end of last week I would have struggled to put much flesh on this perception. That was before I found myself at something called the Enterprise Culture Policy Retreat run jointly by the Treasury and the Small Business Service.

The chance to chip in on a discussion that would have real funding implications for the UK government’s enterprise policy was just too good to miss. Most of those there were either running big things, had big titles or had made big money. Others were in a position to pull levers in government, divert funding streams, or if not, knew someone who could. A few were early entrepreneurs. And there was me.

The way that attitudes among young people are changing was given some definition in research presented by Sian Davies, chief executive of Henley Centre HeadlightVision, trend-spotting and research consultants. The study, based on 1,500 interviews with a representative sample of people aged between 14 and 30 grouped young people in to four significant categories: young self-starters, hesitant creatives, corporate strivers and drifting opportunists.

There were two other sizeable groups, labelled “traditionalists” and “avoiders” but since neither of these was going to have much influence on the future direction of business they didn’t feature much in the presentation.

As Ms Davies pointed out, not all young people fall neatly in to one group. The groups are an approximation, varying in size, designed as a relative way to understand young people.

Significantly, perhaps, the only category that would appear to tick most of the boxes for big company graduate-recruitment schemes is that of the so-called corporate strivers: ambitious career-focused, team players who fear failure and who are motivated by status and material wealth but who are also keen to give something back to society. They like to have the stability of an organisation around them and they are risk averse.

How many graduate management programmes would turn away this kind of candidate with the right academic qualifications? They know what they want and if you treat them right and pay them well you might just hold on to them. They fit the model of the corporate steward. But don’t expect them to innovate or to take risks.

For each of the other three featured categories of young people, there are going to be issues in graduate programmes. The self-starters are described as “naturally enterprising forward-thinking optimists, able to see commercial opportunities.” As a recruiter you may be willing to overlook or even be excited by their willingness to take some risks.

But how do you handle their reluctance to plan and their lack of sustained focus, not to mention their impatience? This is a group that wants it all, and now. Not that you can advertise for them anymore. Demanding a young self-starter has become taboo since the Age Discrimination Act became law earlier this month.

What about the hesitant creatives? These are “practical, pragmatic individuals, natural planners who like to feel in control.” The trouble is that their creativity does not sit comfortably within boundaries or the kind of conventions – such as dress codes – imposed by many employers. Another issue for business is that these people tend to be risk averse and can lack confidence and self-belief.

Then there’s the fourth group – the drifting opportunists: the “live for today fun-seekers who are not natural planners.” For these people friendships matter more than being part of an organisation. Their social life matters as much as their work. They can be enterprising and they will take risks if there is a clear short-term benefit, but they can lack self-belief and drive.

I think there is room for a mixture of approaches in the workplace and wouldn’t exclude any of these attitudes. But some companies would. The way that many companies are refining their competency models and raising their academic hurdles in candidate sifting, has created an impression of exclusion among graduates, particularly those who are made to feel they belong to second-string universities.

Many online recruitment offerings are designed not only to encourage what companies regard as the right type of people but also to discourage others who might be persuaded the job is not for them.

Self-exclusion appears to be happening, but not necessarily to the advantage of traditional employers. Statistics gathered by the Department of Trade and Industry’s Small Business Service for the second quarter of 2006 reveal that something like 3.7 million people in the UK today are self-employed, some eight per cent of the population over the age of 16.

Five years ago the figure was 3.3 million and 10 years ago it was 2.8m. There are 4.3 million small and medium sized enterprises in the UK, the largest volume since estimates began in 1980. Enterprise is growing in the UK, but it appears to happening in spite of the existing education and employment system. Enterprising spirit has been squeezed from the exam-obsessed curriculum.

How many of these businesses, I wonder, have been started by older workers, discarded by or disillusioned with former employers? How many have been launched by young people disenchanted by what one of my friends, a partner in a large accountancy firm, describes as “the hamster wheel” of modern corporate life?

Rajeeb Dey, president of the Oxford Entrepreneurs Society, a group he established at Oxford University, says that that too little support is extended to those graduates who want to establish their own businesses.

“You may want to set up a business but because you have no immediate support you get tempted in to going down the big recruiter route for a little while, maybe two years, then you find you can’t get out.”

Several good things came out of last week’s meeting, not least the recognition that the education system must develop a better approach to preparing enterprising people. More important perhaps, were the inspiring examples of entrepreneurship already changing the way we work and do business. But those are stories for tomorrow.