BEING PICKY? OR JUST DESPERATELY TRYING TO MAKE YOUR DEGREE PAY OFF?
A row has erupted over whether graduate ‘job snobs’ should take anything they can get or hold out for a position where their degree is appreciated, after a graduate told the Guardian that her attitude towards low-skilled, poorly paid jobs has shifted dramatically since she finished her degree.
In her article Students who scoff at lowly cafe jobs are in for a shock, history graduate Laura Kay describes the sharp contast between the attitudes of undergraduates who come into the Sheffield cafe where she works, and her own attitude towards her job. She writes:
“Although attitudes among graduates are certainly changing, as increasing numbers find themselves working in unexpected environments, there remains a feeling that when you finish university, you’ll be different. I know because I thought this too. The real stigma of low-skilled work most often comes in the form of an “it’s fine for them but not for me” mentality.
“You can have the perfect A-levels, an arts degree from a Russell Group university and all the ambition in the world, but you also have to be willing to put in the graft — and perhaps not in your first choice of career. Graduates need to realise that in this economic climate we have to work twice as hard to get where we want to be. A “graduate job” may no longer be quite what it used to be but it doesn’t mean that there isn’t work out there.
“…As employment minister Esther McVey helpfully pointed out, us young people have got to be willing to take jobs at Costa Coffee and not just expect to walk into our dream profession. Well, there is no danger of that, not in the north of England during a recession.
“In fact, graduates are likely to get a real shock when entering the world of employment, realising those loans weren’t just free wine money and that there are thousands of people applying for just 300 jobs at a new Asda. It turns out that minimum wage jobs are actually gold dust.”
While Graduate Fog admires Laura’s work ethic – and her frankness and honesty when writing this article – is it just us or is there something sad about this piece too?
Purely because of the economic circumstances into which she has graduated (beyond her control), Laura seems to have accepted that the value of her talents has been reduced. When jobs are scarce, this is what many graduates are being told – but we remain unconvinced that it is true. After all, the businesses that are doing well are prepared to pay handsomely for the best graduates around.
Is it fair that graduates who hope to find well-paid, challenging roles after completing their degree are being labelled ‘job snobs’? Or is it reasonable that having invested your money, hard work and time in gaining a degree, graduates can expect that it should ‘buy’ you a job that’s that’s challenging, well-paid and has good future prospects? Should you lower your expectations – or stay focused on achieving your ambitions?
*ARE YOU A GRADUATE JOB SNOB?
Having just invested tens of thousands of pounds and three years of work in your degree, isn’t it fair to expect a role with decent pay and prospects? Or do you think graduates need to adjust their expectations about the kind of role they are likely to get? Have your say below…
I would be happy to do any job I can do but it is hard to get any job. Also café jobs take on staff but don’t provide transport so its not realistic if you don’t have transport.
I agree the tone of the Guardian article is wrong. There are some genuine snobs who look down on service staff – and clearly that’s something no one should do.
But many of the people who are doing that come from money and will basically buy a career with their parents’ money, so they likely won’t be in for a shock.
The comments on the article have it better – jobs of all kinds are so scarce that even if all these hoards of graduates apparently holding out for something better – and I don’t think there’s really that many – started applying for all the services/entry-level admin jobs, most of them still wouldn’t get anywhere.
With regard to holding out for graduate vacancies – unless you can live off your own, or with a working partner (so unable to get income-based JSA), or parents’ money that isn’t possible for most people.
Eventually – depending on the Job Centre (some ignore you more than others, whilst others hand out sanctions like sweets) – you will be coerced or (if you have no parental home to return to) forced into applying for practically everything under the sun, and get forced into workfare.
However, students who do get jobs whilst at uni – at least in those courses where the workload makes that reasonable (mine was one) – may at least save themselves from having to sign on straight after uni. I wish I’d done more part-time work now (I’d at least have got less overdrawn) – though I was fortunate into having two years’ continuous work after uni before being plunged into a year of mostly being on the dole.
And perhaps have the prospect of staying put in their uni city and not returning to the parental home straight after uni (which may be in the middle of nowhere) if they can find a room they can rent with their earnings and – if applicable – under 35 Housing Benefit top-up, or if they could increase their hours.
Trying to find somewhere to move out of halls into when you don’t have a job would be extremely difficult (a lot of no DSS signs), unless you had a month’s rent and deposit and were just vague or lied I suppose.
Loads of comments coming through on Twitter…
@jdwasmuth I agree but if 50% go to uni where are jobs for them? A friend manages call-centre: Oxbridge grads apply for the basic jobs!
@Izabela_B Absolutely! But:”the percentage of graduates working in non-graduate roles has risen,since the 2008/09 recession”NSO data
@Chrystina It should afford you better opportunities than those without qualifications.
@Carrie_Off Companies need to start placing value on people and not use internship as a euphemism for slavery
@RogerEmmott There is much more to it than just investing £30k.
@Carrie_Off I agree completely. I think the argument is that you have to prepare in this economy to support yourself by other means and innovate differently. It’s not a bankable fact that you can get a job immediately and sometimes you have to pay the bills.
@Koenig_Jakob Just that students should be warned about how dire future may be, and not look down on service staff. Indeed, no one should.
@Edubabbler Personally there’s no job you are overqualified for, there’s always opp to learn and grow.
Just came across this vintage Graduate Fog post warning grads about getting too comfortable in ‘stop-gap’ bar, cafe, shop, admin jobs…
Pulling pints or waiting tables? Quit your stop-gap job NOW, graduates warned
More tweets…
@Sabrina Lianne says: Degree tuition is def too much to be paying for a cafe job, but we have too many people with degrees. No way around that.
@JaymeNWUK why would it [a degree] entitle you to a employment? There just are not enough jobs in the market for everyone.
@Misformaddie says:
Indeed there’s something sad about the article: the sadness is today’s graduates are part of a generation let down by its govt.
I haven’t met any graduates not willing to do lower paid work (though I imagine there are some). I’ve always been willing to do these kind of jobs, though now I’m having the problem, since getting my masters degree, where employers are telling me I’m too over qualified for these lower paid jobs I’m applying for and they won’t hire me.
Seems graduates can’t win.
Agreed with KM. Seems to be a lose lose situation.
I’m a graduate with a first class degree on JSA and I got told to take my degree off my cv when applying for ‘simpler jobs’ because employers are ‘less likely to employ you if you’ve got a degree because they think you’re going to be less committed to the job and just leave when something better comes along’. The value of a degree has greatly depreciated in recent years and it is becoming more and more apparent.
I’m not content with doing non-relevant work because life’s too short and I didn’t bust a gut for 3 years just to end up in a place I could have been before doing my degree. If that makes me a job snob, so be it.
It is a long way off but what sort of pension might I get/not get without a decent history of NI contributions. Youth unemployment is really storing up problems for the future. It doesn’t seem to be something many have considered much.
@graduate, if you don’t have enough years of NI contributions the minimum state pension-which is barely enough to live on, that’s if they haven’t abolished the state pension by the time you reach that age.
Very clever to conflate different issues and use it as a way to bash lazy/snobbish[insert prejudice here] students. The issues are not mutually exclusive. I don’t know anyone that looks down on those working in coffee shops etc. After all, how else are people supposed to support themselves without wealthy parents/debt? The problem is the scale and lack of mobility.
I think it is possible to recognise that working in low-skilled, poorly paid and irrelevant jobs for more than a certain time is not a good outcome for many people who have spent years studying and spent a lot of money pursuing their ambition. The reason for this is that after a while you can be written-off for many graduate jobs/careers. You can be pigeon-holed and negative inferences drawn from your CV (and good luck with the time gaps if you leave things off your CV). In other words stop gap jobs are okay for a while, but if you are still doing them years later then this is a bad outcome for everyone. The real danger in this situation is inverse snobbery, whereby doing unpaid internships/casual low-paid jobs on bad terms for prolonged periods is normalized and seen as a right of passage and a way to bash graduates that supposedly see themselves as ‘above it’.
The biggest myth that still needs busting is the ‘work your way up’ meme. Social mobility in this country has been declining for a long time and for many there is no such thing any more, just being churned in casual/seasonal low-paid jobs. It isn’t in the government’s interests to admit this, just celebrate the fact that ‘jobs are being created’ without looking at the specifics. Many people don’t want to admit this to themselves either because it would be like giving up hope.
I was a bit of a job snob, but it can be good to work as a telemarketer/market researcher teleophone interviewer like me, if there are big clients, the department is part of other departments which means you can potentially learn about the skills required for other jobs, get a promotion and it demonstrated a person can hold down a job !!! The low skilled jobs have better prospects in London.
I wish in the past, I had worked as a market research telephone interviewer and crashed on my friend’s floor in
I wish I had undertaken market research telephone interviewer (now there is very little work) and crashed on the my friend’s floor in London for a short period. There are fewer prospects outside London.
This is all part of the plan to enslave the population. Just watch.
I totally agree with you George, and mentioned in a post on another article (about regretting choice of degree I think), that I believe we are deliberately being trapped/pulled down, with every rope we previously had drag ourselves backup, being cut. Adult funding used to be subsidised, and all funding ha been withdrawn, so before, you could start at college and do A’Levels, BTECs etc etc, freely. But now, if you’re over 24, there is absolutely NO support, and you’re expected to cough up yourself fully, or get a ’24+ advanced learning loan’ which is basically a student loan for further education. Oh, and fees have gone up too! I was quoted between £3 and 4k for an access to HE course at nearly every college, so that was out. Luckily I found a distance learning based one at around 1/3 of that. Hopefully NHS funding for health degrees remain for now or I’m f**ked! God help anyone who want’s to retrain.
The idea is to get everyone suckered into debt then we all become wage slaves.
@Simon I wholeheartedly agree with your comments above. I’ve gone through the British/Tory/New Labour memes of “Working your way up”, and it being “easier to get a job while in work than out of it” and “any job is better than no job”.
After 20 years in the work force, working during university right up to and through final exams, to be able to afford travel to the London university on the outskirts of the Capital that I could go to, as I come from Inner London from a working class family and could never afford to go further afield. Then we were told that we ought to take any job, and work our way up. Guess what? It took 10 years at least to acquire a wage high enough to be liable to pay back my student loans, which John Major and then Blair were more than happy to impose on students. The next ten years were then spent trying to advance your career and then the bankers bust the economy and you get made redundant because the Brown government was trying to get elected and decded the public didn’t need Civil/Contract/Consumer law advisors in London supporting Trading Standards and Environmental agencies etc(the CABs were now the sole provider). So you take up part-time work. Get made redundant from that too. So you take up Voluntary work in a school while claiming JSA. Yuo do this for a year and do well enough to get accepted for a PGCE, SChool Centred with a wage and a timetable. The DWP in its infinite wisdom decide to sanction you for doing this voluntary work because THEY did not source it, and it is not in a sector they consider important, and so you are not “actively seeking work and not making yourself available for work” and then refer you to a Work Programme Provider. These guys can’t do anything with you as you are a graduate, experienced in many different sectors built up over the past 20 years, in a country that has been encouraging young people to “take any job and work your way up” since I’ve entered the workplace in 1991. You know how to fill and update and adapt CVs, clearly because you’ve got all these jobs. They then tell you that having all these jobs on your CV makes an employer think negatively of your skills. Why? If the premise is for people to start low and work up incrementally, why is this then a negative trait when encountered in a potential applicant? Should a graduate stay in the £12K job he got straight after graduation to prove some loyalty to an employer that allows them to languish for decades on the same minimum wage? SHould anyone? So then the WPP ‘encourages’ you to omit things from your CV, which then raises the gaps problem. If you ignore their ‘suggestion’ and include all your experience, relevant to the job being applied for, or all your experience full stop, you get sanctioned for “not making yourself adequately available for work”. Then you source work yourself using agencies, but nothing is ever permanent, and find work with a company delivering the Customer Services for the Training of security & gamesmakers for the London Olympics. This is a temeporary company which outsources almost all its labour every 4 years to deliver this service for the Olympics. You start off part-time, and do well enough to get full-time work. But the Games end, and so does your job, and the entire company which packs up for another four years. You get an email for a reference. So you sign back on. WP in full swing by this time, and the DWP decides that since the WP is a 2 year programme, it is going to deem you as being on it for the whole time your claim ran for including periods when you were working, either part-time or full-time and NOT claiming JSA. This way you can benefit from the WP training and assessment. This assessment gets an officer from the newly created ‘National Careers Service’, that sends a lady (with the greatest respect to Nigerian immigrants) with very poor English and spelling, as I have to correct her on the DWP gumpf she’s attempting to read to me, asking a series of questions to determine my work experience and qualifications. She then determines that I’m already doing all the things I need to do to get a job, and try to change career into Teaching. She surmises that I can, if I wish, undertake a Literacy & Numeracy Course Level 1. When I ask, why she feels this would be necessary or relevant to me, considering I’m clearly highly literate, enough to be able to correct her in reading , ironically, Level 1 English asking questions like “Do you adapt and tailor your CV for different jobs?”, she gets defensive and then starts to right up my report. More agency work. More Cover Supervisor work and T.A. roles with at least 3 agencies. A day here, half there, couple periods of cover. Paying for CRBs because Chris Grayling & Michael Gove have decided to allow employers to ask for CRBs/DBSs for every frelling thing now and everyone wants their own CRB. This comes out of JSA by the way. Passport expired because you haven’t been able to afford to go anywhere outside the country in almost a decade. Haven’t needed to. But if you want a job… Passport renewal costs more than 2 week JSA!! Wow. Begging from friends and fam because IDS still wants you to sign up to UJM, because writing a record in a book dated and annotated with greater detail than the tiny 5-slot form you’re given. So you go and check out the law. Welfare Reform act 2012 S17 gives you defences against mandation to sign up with UJM, or be dicatated to as to how you record your jobsearch, but on the ground any advisor can do what they like. SO some weeks the battle is “Why did you not use UJM and why did you use paper/book record?” So you spend lots of money in net cafes to print reams of screenshots to meet your 25-50 jobs a week target. Sanction. Others see the reams and say “is this an efficient use of your time recording all this jobsearching in screenshots?” Explain the previous advisors paper sanction, but Mr JCP advisor doesn’t care, until I show him the record in my book recording the conversations and outcomes of all the previous advisors before him with their signatures below (Yes I’m particular like that, these bastards are treacherous). They then decide they cannot get me with UJM, I’m complying and exceeding my jobsearch conditions, so cannot get me in any way other than through pettiness, so they pull the trump card: IDS retconning of Caitlin Reilly & James Wilson V DWP so they can compel anyone to do whatever they like. Then they say “all your agency work is not full-time. We can see you are getting work even as recently as in the past few weeks before Christmas, and even though it is now January, but it isn’t full-time, so we don’t consider that RECENT work experience. Therefore we believe you have lost some skills for not being in FULL-time work, and must refer you to a WP/Private company to gain work experience. You ask what skills they feel you have lost, or need, and what or how wthis 1 month stint with a private company will provide those, especially since it is 35 hours a week and doesn’t exempt me from the 35hours jobseeking time I have to put in to meet the JSA agreement. Why do you thik I will benefit from this? “We don’t know. Everyone has to do this now.” This is a manager saying this. Oh I’m not paid for this by the way. It’s “work activity but it is not work”. A work Provider that when applying for a warehouse job looked at my CV and questioned my qualifications (The recruiter after his intro speech, looking over applicants’ CVs, mostly experienced workers like myself, some garduates, some not, bluntly states: “I will look over your CVs”, then looks at mine and says” I’ll be honest with your qualifications I wouldn’t have bothered applying”. But the application form required that full 10 year employment history be disclosed, with no gaps. You can’t win. By the way, I’m homeless. Been sofa surfing for the past 4 years. Parents mortgage through the roof on their ex-council home which took them decades to earn enough to get the mortgage for. 20 year loyalty with a care company working from bottom to management, rewarded with redundancy of my middle aged mother, the sole breadwinner because dad’s retired, replaced by a young Polish worker, means they have to emigrate to my Dad’s country of origin. Mum doesn’t have enough years left to pay off the mortgage what with Right To Buy inflating the prices with the premiium apartments built onto ex-council blocks. I can’t help her, I’m in a worse position. They have to rent out the rooms of me and my younger brother, just graduated, working part-time in hotels and retail just like I did trying to make ends meet and get a good job. Can’t house me, I have no children. The borough’s ‘regeneration scheme’ rewards people who’ve lived in the borough 20 years plus. I’ve lived in it 30 plus. But my parents bought their home, even if I don’t live with them so that grants me the grand title of being homeless, but not in priority need, so I must seek private options, they say. With what? Thak God for the very kind friends that have been allowing me to rotate their sofas for what is an indefinite period it seems.
I’ve managed to convince one very good one, to pay me the basic minimum of my costs, to maintain a phone bill and diminishing overdraft agreement I’ve paid diligently for the past decade, fighting tooth and nail to convince my bank that a little money consistently is better than no money at all, even though it is their charges that caused the OD in the first place. This means that I have signed off JSA. at least I don’t have to outlay the extra cost to provide evidence and travel to a place to work, but receive the same pay for meeting JSA conditions, yet still have to meet those conditions. WHat were 20 years of NI paid for?
This is long, I’m sorry. But this is life in Tory Britain. When I am a successful teacher, sourced off my own impetus without the DWP, I will emigrate to one of the very countries we are supposed to be rivals with. I will others like me to do the same. This country doesn’t give two hoots about it’s people and even less about those from inner city communities.
You have to maintain a false sense of positivity. Employers do not like negativity. Obviously the prospect of being sanctioned or losing a house etc makes this rather difficult. I’m on antidepressants so maintaining positivity is also a problem. I try but I worry interviewers can see through the veneer sometimes.
I graduated in 2011 with a 2:1 and because I didn’t do A-levels (I did an Access Course) to get into Uni, Employers don’t recognise this qualification and want UCAS points which I don’t have.
I currently have a job in Retail. It’s not the best job in the world but it’s full time and I have advanced to a Team Leader role. But I feel like the only way i’m going to advance in any career is by going about it the long way. I’m 29 now (I went to Uni at 24) so feel like time is pressing on for what I want to do. I had to move back home after Uni so still living at home at 29 doesn’t make me feel very good about myself at the minute. Since Graduating I have had waves of depression because I havn’t been given that ‘foot in the door’ on a graduate-entry job. It seems to me everyone gets there apart from me.
We have a lot of Graduates at my work place and I believe i’m the ‘last’ graduate of 2011 that is still working at my place. All of the others have left or have secured jobs. I put this down to the UCAS points problem. It seems that if I want a career of sorts, i’m going to have to go about it the long way, which in turn, makes me think, why did I go to University in the first place?
What job areas require UCAS points? Seems totally ridiculous.
Working for years on end in a low paid job with no prospect of anything better can really take its toll. I guess I hoped that my time in low paid work would teach me that money isn’t everything and that getting a challenging graduate job isn’t the be all and end all but it kind of backfired when I realised how difficult it is to live on a low wage.
Graduates are not snobs. I have been there and unfortunately I know the feeling. On a dole for a year, I could not get a place on a graduate management programme, A’Level grades always too low. Despite a 2.1 from a respectable Uni (not RG but not an ex-poly either) and an MA from a top-10 RG institution. I started on £11K in Bristol for a broker in 1999 on a fixed term contract, moved to London in 2003 on £26K and in 2010, on £47.5K after having moved twice. The graduate premium is an absolute myth! I would never, repeat NEVER go to university had I known. Most of my colleagues at work have done so much better, final pension, career and the majority have left school with GCSEs!
@Nicolas
Sorry to hear about that. Many of the ‘graduate schemes’ automatically filter for A-level grades. That means that no matter how well you do subsequently then your application will be rejected for having ABB rather than AAB. The longer it takes you to get in the harder because the filtering depends on grade inflation. What was an BBB filter one year will be an ABB a few years later.
These accusations of snobbery/’skills gap’/other bs memes are just to disguise the fact that there aren’t enough of the types of job people are looking for or that have decent t&cs. Knowing politicians, what else would you do rather than blame the people themselves? Their masters call out for cheap disposable labour.
@simon
dont forget some grad schemes look at your GCSE’s and if you dont match them either, you will get an automatically rejection, when i applied for grad schemes, i would fill out the online form, a min after it sent i would get an automatic rejection e-mail.
the reason that i found out why one grad scheme uses GCSE’s, is due to the high numbers of uneployment grads, and grad schemes now need a further way to filter grads
matthew
This phrase “job snob” is just a clever tactic to get people off the dole and ignore the problems of modern careers. The problems are lack of part time work coupled with careers where graduates are expected to be at a standard beyond what was expected in 1980s, which gives jsa excuses to bully graduates.
The clincher for me was doing a call centre job after uni and STILL getting called a job snob for not applying for unrelated work. And I did 50+ hours week, for fuck’s sake! Lesson to depressed graduates – get what it takes to get the correct role and value stop gap employment. But don’t do it to appease idiot politicians or cuntish family members. Get the stop gap job and they’ll just find something else to complain about and government will always find people to tag with that term.
It’s supposed to be the working class who are too lazy to do unskilled or manual work but anyone who has worked in recruitment can tell you it’s the middle class graduate who thinks they are entitled to walk into a cushy office job and see everything else as beneath them. The very same people with contempt for the lazy chavs they are supposedly superior to. We have far more graduates than we need.