30,000 new graduates entered the labour market in 2009

Over the past ten years the UK has done a great deal to address the potential skills gap; yet despite the 30,000 graduates entering the labour market in 2009 nearly a third of them remain unemployed!

We know that the kind of high skill jobs needed in our economy would be best suited to graduate level workers, so how come the disparity between the number leaving university and those entering the workforce?

In part it’s a matter of timing and numbers. The issue would seem to be that recent economic spasms have slowed down the drive towards a relentlessly more able and better qualified workforce, and as the overall labour market becomes a little more testing then those without experience suffer disproportionately. So the person who pulls your pint, packs your reusable supermarket bags and tries to sell you life insurance may now be a graduate.

Alternatively it may be that there simply aren’t plenty of sparky young people waiting for the right opportunity. Selecting not just those with the qualifications but those with the right skills, attitudes and behaviours is no more simple in a period of over-supply than it was in a previous age when only the very few had letters after their name.

In fact it can be like hunting for a needle in a haystack, or more appropriately a diamond in the rough.

 

 

So how do organisations make sure that they select the gems?

Action based learning At the heart of a good selection process is to put people in team environments and see how they get on. The process of action learning has long been part of the assessment centre model and I see no reason for this not to be continued. Expensive to take 50 or 60 people away for a couple or three days and see how they work together but a graduate may cost you in excess of £100,000 in training costs and salary in the first couple of years. It’s a sizable investment and an expensive one to get wrong.

Understanding & engaging in your business Within that development centre, we want to create tasks which will look at how well they have learned things or can learn things – group exercises and activities which require them to understand a little more about us and about how we do business and the kinds of activities we’re engaged in. Now in a good organisation, this kind of knowledge acquisition in advance of an action based learning activity would be delivered online. Why not for a development centre or initial graduate recruitment?

Structure activities for re-use We have a group of potential employees who – for the most part – live a significant portion of their lives in cyberspace (different from being cyber space cadets – identify them and weed them out would be my advice) and if we have already created online resources for other induction or on-boarding purposes, a re-use would be a relatively low cost, if not cost free option.

A clear understanding of what you’re looking for This requires a clear understanding of the skills, attitudes and behaviours that would make the most difference to the organisation. Do we want me-too corporate clones or have we looked at skill gaps and identified a need for an injection of fresh ideas, new thinking and different behaviours? Sometimes the outcome of an organisation’s learning needs analysis can be a course menu designed to fit square pegs in round holes. Why not identify which shaped holes we have and fill them with the appropriate graduate-sized peg?

Recruit for the future And given that we are taking on someone who has learning skills and a clear need to be polished and shaped to meet the changing expectations of the modern organisation, what role do they play in articulating their own training needs and their aspirations as learners? This begs a whole series of questions. How much they know about what is expected in the roles to which they are being recruited? How aware are they of their own areas of strength and weakness and how honest are they about these? Are they hungry to learn or do they think they know it all (this is not ‘The Apprentice’ after all, thank god)? Is there an appropriate graduate training scheme in place and how adaptable is the combination of on the job experience, coaching and formal development in meeting the needs of individuals?

Putting these valuable stars of our future firmament in situations where the way we would want them to approach their own development in the future is modelled, seems to be a great opportunity and potentially a driver for cultural change.