IS YOUR EMPLOYER UNDER-USING YOUR SKILLS?
Today’s university graduates are spending more time than ever making tea and coffee for their colleagues, with some spending nearly nine hours per week brewing up. Is this really the best use of the education and skills you’ve spent three years (and tens of thousand of pounds) developing during your degree?
A new survey – by Allianz Insurance – questioned 1,000 graduates who had left university over the last three years, as well as 1,000 business leaders who have employed graduates within that time. It found that the average graduate spends 313 hours per year making hot drinks for their boss and colleagues – a rise of 55 hours since 2013. London graduates spend the most time making tea – nearly nine hours per week (yes, that’s more than an entire working day!)
In contrast, general administrative duties such as scanning documents, minute-taking at meetings and diary management total 254 hours a year for the average graduate.
While Graduate Fog understands that the job of making hot drinks often falls to the most junior person in the office, these figures do seem excessive – and suggest to us that graduates’ skills being increasingly under-used in the UK’s workplaces. Are bosses encouraging teams to view the office graduate as the general office assistant, rather than a member of staff with their own workload and real responsibilities? Are you happy to make the tea – or do you feel it undermines your confidence?
*ARE YOU TREATED LIKE THE OFFICE SKIVVY?
Do your colleagues expect you to make the tea and coffee? How does that make you feel – are you happy to be helpful, or does it make you feel like the office skivvy? Do you feel the work you do reflects the skills and education you bring to your workplace – or are you capable of doing much more?
and suggest to us that graduates’ skills being increasingly under-used in the UK’s workplaces.
What skills? Please be specific as to what skills the graduate has above and beyond their colleagues who may have been working there several years?
Sometimes so-called colleagues really take the pee where this is concerned. Despite being a qualified teacher, I spent some time working as a teaching assistant and, although teaching assistants usually spend some time doing menial tasks such as photocopying and laminating, I felt that some members of staff (including ‘more senior’ teaching assistants as well as teachers) gave me more of this type of work to do than was reasonable. It was almost as if they enjoyed making someone who was a graduate feel demeaned.
One of the most frustrating things for me during my time at that school was at the start of the year when a ‘senior’ teaching assistant expected me to make lots of little PECS cards for pupils to use, whilst she had plenty of time for hob nobbing with the parents. I started to worry that the parents would see me as a dogsbody who was there to run around doing menial tasks whilst the other members of staff got to spend valuable time with the children!
I don’t know if many people realise this, but there is an important difference to be recognised between being expected to do a fair share of menial tasks and giving someone lots of those tasks to do with the intention of bullying them. Just do a Google search on this issue and you’ll see what I mean.
https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=menial+tasks+AND+bullying
Hi Guys & Girls,
Can someone tell me what you would do if you were 18 again?
Would you still go to college? Or go to Trade school? or work some minimum wage job?
There are so many factors rigged against young people today. For example, you spend 4 years or more, accumulate 50,000 pounds of debt with employers requesting minimum of 3-5 years work experience, and in this shit economy your chances of landing a job in your field less than 50%
Then, because there is not enough jobs for graduates or people in general. You are forced to jump on JSA (Ian Duncan – Slave labour programme) and work for less than the minimum wage while trying to pay for your cost of living? WTF???
So, let me get this straight. I have to pay 50,000 pounds and spend 4 years or more to train myself for a job that does not exist?
I just don’t see how an 18 year could support himself today?
Thanks
Chris Wells
I was shocked when I read this number, certainly in the industry I have just come out of as a recruiter this isn’t the case. I recruited for fee earning employees, as a graduate your time is money, more so than most as you don’t have the business development skills, you will therefore be put to work straight away and time spent faffing around making tea for the team just doesn’t happen! It’s a shared job that most take turns doing, even the MDs!
@Chris If I were 18 again, I would be looking for a good employer training scheme which offered a reasonable wage as well as the opportunity to gain qualifications ‘on the job.’ There are opportunities such as these in areas including accountancy and engineering.
Either that, or I would advise an academically capable 18 year old to do everything he or she can to enter a career where there’s a fairly certain chance of employment- medicine is still a career where this seems to be the case.
Having said all this, there still needs to be a certain degree of motivation on the part of the young person, or it is much less likely that he or she will succeed. There also needs to be much better careers advice in schools and colleges, as young people need to know what they’re aiming for two or three years in advance, so that they can choose to study appropriate subjects in the sixth form or at college.
This is ridiculous.I was never asked to make coffee for anyone else but got free coffees all the time e.g. To make amends when my manager had to reschedule a meeting