From this morning's Guardian:
This year's graduates face the toughest battle in a generation for jobs, with tens of thousands facing unemployment, according to evidence documenting the impact of the economic downturn.
Ministers are so concerned that they are drawing up a rescue package to help the class of 2009 find a job or get new skills when they graduate this summer. The proposals, from the universities secretary John Denham's office, will target the 18-24 age group amid fears that a generation of young people will be scarred by recession. They include an internship scheme where students would work at a reduced wage to gain experience. Four firms - including Barclays and Microsoft - have agreed to take part in the scheme, which is being called the National Internship Scheme.
Denham told the Guardian: "This year there will be a large number of graduates - the children of the babyboomers - and we are keen to make sure that they get as good a chance as we can give them to get jobs and build good careers. We will not leave them to fend for themselves.
He says: "We don't want these spells of unemployment to get long. A spell of unemployment is bad when young, and the longer it is, the worse it is. We want to do everything to prevent it becoming long-term unemployment."
Evidence of the extent of the downturn in graduate recruitment uncovered by the Guardian includes:
• Major companies have narrowed their search for graduates to five elite universities as they cut recruitment numbers.
• The organisers of the annual graduate recruitment "milk round" say jobs in finance and retail are drying up. Even where companies are recruiting, vacancies will not necessarily last until summer as the economic slump worsens.
• The management consultancy KPMG, seen as a recruitment barometer, says its 600 graduate entry jobs are nearly all taken months ahead of schedule as students scramble for the top jobs.
First of all, don't panic, it'll be fine.
Back in the day, when I were a young one, whiling away my days in the Free Palestinian Liberation Cafe drinking god-awful organic coffee from Chiapas, the milk round dried up regularly. I still managed to get a free weekend in England (I think it was with Lloyds Bank) where I had a very nice time and failed miserably to get a job in finance because I didn't have the killer instinct they needed for retail banking.
Imagine if I hadda gotten that job. I'd be an unemployed branch manager by now probably.
More importantly, I'd be miserable.
When we left university, we had a two stop trip.
Stop one. Out the college, turn right, down to Tara St. dole office to sign on.
Every Thursday morning you had to go down to get your money - £59.63 if I remember rightly, and yeah it was a pain because you had to queue for an hour, but you met everyone you knew there and spent the time figuring out where to meet up that night.
Stop two. Continue down Tara St. to the quays, turn left, then left again onto D'Olier St. to the FAS office. Ask the nice man in the FAS office if you could get on a FAS scheme.
A FAS scheme was/ is like a National Intern Program, except the government paid you to work for a theatre or a charity, or a hospice or a school, or a community radio station, something in the public sphere that needed help and had no money. It differs from the new National Intern Program in that it didn't subsidize labour for a multinational that should be paying proper wages. And unlike the new NIP, if you needed to change your hours, or make your point strongly, or try new things, you were allowed. I have a feeling you'll have to work very hard in the NIP to be one of the interns that gets kept on.
On a FAS scheme everyone worked about 20 hours a week. Lots of important social capital got made and spent. There was a lot of sitting around chatting and learning about other people's lives and dreams. A lot of bad coffee was drunk. I sat in a Portakabin in Coolock for a few months and dreamed up a community arts festival. A friend of mine ran a radio station. Another friend of mine managed a domestic abuse shelter.
The other twenty hours a week, you lived your life. You made art, or wrote, or helped run a magazine, or a theatre collective and of course you had some class of a nixer job so you could eat meat a couple of times a week.
You went to the cinema during the day.
Eventually, the world turned, the economy got better, all those compatriots of mine who had studied real subjects, like computer engineering, got the multinationals interested in Ireland, and we all landed in the real world. Started making a little money.
A little money.
That's the thing. The wages will be lower now. You'll have to work your way up to the big bucks for a few years.
Life's a bitch to random generations.
This recession business happened to us.
It's happening to you.
It didn't happen to the one in between.
But, far worse things happened to previous generations.
And the fair trade coffee is at least drinkable nowadays.
You'll be the better generation for it.
And we should spare a thought for those Palestinian 18 - 24 year olds who have no future to look forward to, only the bitter harvest of what's being sown today.
