Sue's Tragedy - The Conclusion

The Grad Most Wanted was in her 5th and final year at Uni and in April it was time to look for graduate roles. The Piranha Recruiting Frenzy really took off with huge give-aways, big functions and lots of marketing spend as the big firms competed for the best.

Sue applied to 8 companies and 5 of them offered her jobs. However, as with her summer internship, it was hard to choose between them as she didn’t know too much. So she went to the one she knew, ‘Big Bank’ - their summer program was successful.

Sue started their Graduate Program, which involves 12 months of rotations to different divisions. “I shadow people, watch what they do and sit in on meetings, but I’m not expected to say much except hello and goodbye! I get some simple jobs, nothing too challenging but they take me a while to do as everything is so new. It took nearly an hour to send my first fax!”

When the rotation ended, Sue joined her permanent Division. Then she resigned after 8 months to join a smaller firm.

Why? She simply made the wrong choice for HER – and 5 factors contributed to the mistake:

1. It started with her study choice of a combined law degree, which was partly driven by the marks she got (“don’t waste them” she was told). And partly to earn status with her family and friends. 5 years of your life and a big student debt is a huge investment to make on such flimsy grounds. With perfect hindsight, a 3 year commerce degree majoring in marketing would have been a better choice for Sue.

From experience in my family and also amongst my children’s friends, I have seen the pressure to choose ‘status’ degrees. My son and his girlfriend are both studying Arts. They did well in their school results, and so people keep asking them “why didn’t you choose something better/more practical as you had the marks for it?” Now, there are good reasons for not choosing your ‘Trade’ too early – but that is for next weeks Rant. The key message here is choose what you study based on what you enjoy and ideally what you are good at.

2. Her choice of a big company. We know the reason for the choice – the barrage of marketing shut out the smaller firms. Also, the small ones had less career options and finally, they were not what the best students were competing for (status again).

For many people, the large companies offer a great career. Sue is one of many who are different – she grew up in a family of small business people. She is quite entrepreneurial. She likes a broad role. She likes to make decisions and implement. Not what Big Bank is renowned for! When she resigned she left to join a small company in a role which uses all her organising and people skills and where she has responsibility for some marketing and database projects. A much better match for Sue at this stage in her career.

3. The summer internship. Big Bank achieved its goal of having Sue join them but she learnt little about the real job, what people actually do there and whether banking was really where she wanted to be. As a result, it took almost 3 years to find out that marketing was probably more her thing.

4. The rotation for 12 months – which kept her away from real work. Sue just wanted to get on with something:

“I needed the rotation because I wasn’t sure where I wanted to end up, I needed to learn about different divisions. However, it’s a high price to pay – I just wanted to get on with things, to have a real job with challenges and responsibility.”

5. Finally, she and her friends overly focused on the starting salary. Always a mistake when choosing a new job as it takes your focus off the important things that lead to great careers – the quality of the company, their training, their staff turnover, their flexibility, etc.

What is the real problem for business behind Sue’s story?

It’s the whole process of how we bring young people into the workforce. It takes way too many years. And then happens too fast in a feeding frenzy of selection. Which is a huge waste of resources. And leads to poor outcomes for many of those involved.

Next week we will finish this series on Graduates with a brief analysis of how our society got into this mess and what companies can do about it. Meanwhile there is a better and more profitable way of bringing the young into your workforce - for those who need to Think Different: http://tinyurl.com/55kemunnTo close, a question for you: Are Graduate programs in engineering more successful in THE most important area, retention? Why? What can other industries learn from that?