July 2007 – Career advice for young people

In the next few weeks my eldest son will be entering the jobs market after finishing an MSc in film industry management. As a father it’s probably my biggest concern just now. Any parent wants the best for their children.

All parents must ask themselves whether they have done the right things in career guidance. In the 1967 film, The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock is taken to one side by a friend of the family.

“I want to say one word to you. Just one word,” says the older man: “Plastics.”

The exchange resonated with young people at the time because it was just the kind of advice they were all getting from their elders. Around the same time that The Graduate was doing the rounds my father said something similar to my elder brother who had loved woodwork.

Wood was finished, said dad. Plastic and metal were the future, he said. My brother entered the motor industry and followed a managerial career until he had saved enough in a senior position to buy his own business. When looking at prospects, the businesses that attracted him most were joinery companies.

The one thing we lose as we get older is the generational perspective of our children. However much I try - and I do try - I cannot see the world today through the eyes of someone in their early 20s.

I know from experience that contacts and introductions – popularly described as referrals in the recruitment industry – matter more than simply sending out a CV with a prospective job application.

But I still think it is worth covering all the bases. That does not mean posting CVs in a perfunctory way. It’s better to carry out some thorough research among a selection of potential employers before making any application.

Those who take the scatter-gun approach, taking advantage of easily-accessed online recruitment pages, will find themselves among the mass of applications swamping employer sifting systems that are equally mechanical and impersonal in the way they screen out candidates.

I asked my son if he was approaching some of the big film production companies and found his reply slightly puzzling. “If you’re going in to production I think it’s better to learn your trade in one of the smaller companies rather than in one of the large ones,” he said. “It’s harder to get in to the big companies and once there you can never get out.”

What he’s saying, and this is only his perception, is that structured career management in big companies means that there is a greater likelihood that your career direction will be more heavily influenced by others. It can be difficult to see yourself as an individual when you are just one of the trainees.

I see this at more senior levels too. An accountant friend with young children has just been posted to Switzerland. He had no real desire to go there but did not think it would be good for his career to turn it down. Career moves are mapped by managements tossing around names and possibilities. Sometimes we need to step in and let our own voices be heard. But there is a persistent fear in management that to say “no” is to commit career suicide.

When I entered the jobs market people were still looking for careers among companies that we thought would be around for our lifetime and beyond. Some of these companies no longer exist. Neither can we be certain any more about lifetime careers.

Some company recruiters have been back-pedalling frantically on the popular 1990s message that lifetime careers are over. But that’s because their priorities have changed. In the belt-tightening early 90s there was a fashion for flattening corporate hierarchies.

Today in the late 2000s, demographic reality has sunk in, skill shortages are broadening and concerns have switched to the two big Rs – recruitment and retention. There can be no cast iron career promise, however. Today the message in most talent management programmes is that you will make it on the corporate ladder if you are good enough, and the rungs get narrower with every promotion.

But careers have changed too so that it is quite possible today to move within one discipline, even take on some team management responsibilities, then switch disciplines to a new role as a lone operator again. These are zig-zagging careers, not the kind we used to know that was defined by the upward slope.

In short I’m not sure I can give too much guidance to my son. Parental advice is needed much earlier but it must be delivered gently. The best advice of all, in my opinion, is to encourage independence in young people at an early age. Mothers – who are the worst culprits – should hold back from doing everything for their children, running them around everywhere in the car. It doesn’t help them in the long run.

All of us need to make our own way in the long run and that means we have to think things out for ourselves, to find our star and to follow it.

In talking with my own children about course choices and potential careers I have always urged them to ask themselves these questions: What is it that you love doing? What are you good at? Often, it turns out that the answers to both are related. The next stage is to investigate career possibilities from our recognised interests.

When reading Ernest Hemingway in my early teens I found myself attracted to his simple short sentences that eschewed big words and complicated grammatical structures. I discovered his writing had been influenced by journalism so from that moment on my only desire was to explore writing through journalism. More than thirty years on nothing has changed.

It was not until I encountered the outplacement industry – the practice of helping managers, eased out of their jobs, find new work – that I discovered that many people had never indulged themselves in this way. I met managers in their forties who needed psychotherapy to find their true vocations.

None of us should allow ourselves to be channelled unquestioningly by well meaning parents or teachers in to unfulfilling careers. I try to pass on advice to my sons – often about their personal appearance and smartness that I still think can make a big difference – but they don’t have to take it. They will have to make their own mistakes.

Whatever his future career holds for him - be it film finance, production, journalism or something entirely different - my son will be making his own choices. A parental steer, a good career contact, each can be helpful. But we must not try to see the world through the eyes of our children. It’s changing so fast.

See also: Graduate aspirations