![[TW]Fox](/data/man-of-honor/2009.png){kind=avatar}
I only know a few people who didnt manage to get placements. They were the ones who never bothered to do anything anyway.
Graduates better off on dole than in low-end job?
- Thread starter Angilion
- Start date
I only know a few people who didnt manage to get placements. They were the ones who never bothered to do anything anyway.
12 years ago, as the poster said, this was probably likely after more than a year on the job - especially if he brought a lot of business in. The graduate schemes of investment banks normally see you fast-tracked to management of some sort within three years.[TW]Fox;11447118 said:
Typically a first year graduate in an investment bank will be earning £40 - 45k, and will be eligible for team bonuses from day one, as well as personal performance based (discretionary) bonuses.
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Doesn't suprise me given the kind of £££ they make.
[TW]Fox;11447118 said:
No, I said after 18 months.
And anyway if I'd known that they were looking for someone with my business/technology skillset it WOULD have been £100k+ straight from graduating, yes.
This was a very niche combination of business and technology (specifically COBOL/LINC/Hierarchical databases and the bulk processing of security index information), which unfortunately for me has now been made obsolete.
I'm not saying this is the norm - I've been extremely lucky in all the choices I made - but it is possible - and if you get a degree with a placement year and you are actually any good, you'll usually get offered a job at the end of your final year, or sponsorship AND a job - which is what happened to me, although I didn't take the job as it was in Bristol rather than the City.
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Just the ticket for the average social sciences graduate then isnt it, get them used to poverty as most social science graduates work in Mickey Mouse jobs anyway
Being on the dole is the most depressing thing that can happen to anyone who wants to work.
I'd take any job, and if a future employer cant understand why you took a 'less' paid job then they are morons and not worth working for.
I'd take any job, and if a future employer cant understand why you took a 'less' paid job then they are morons and not worth working for.
Guess me and my friends are the exception then. I graduated from Derby and walked into a decent job in London for one of the top IT consultancies earning about 50% more than the national average wage of the time. Doubled my salary within two years and now am happily earning a very nice living thank you very much. Mates did OK too.
My advice to anyone looking to go to Uni and maximise their chances of employment afterwards is to take a course with a year in industry. To an employer (which I am now), a degree is a required tick in the box and the year in industry tells them that another firm has invested the time and money in you getting to grips with the "real" world of work and you're likely to be a bit more savvy in the work place than others you'll be up against.
mglover070588 said:
Wait until you get in the real world then. 20 hours will seem like a walk in the park when you're being intellectually challenged for 40 or 50 hours a week.
at least that if its in a front office role tbh...
for those roles it is fairly common to be on six figures after the first year
they do make silly amounts of money though - if the bonus pool was distributed evenly between members of staff at goldmans then everyone (inc the security guard) would be on 300k - obviously it isn't distributed evenly since their CEO took home 100 million in pay and bonuses last year......
This actually rings surprisingly true for me - I took a lowly paid job after uni and got stuck in a rut for 4 years. The actual job was fairly hard work / stressful, but had very little in the way of transferrable skills. The irony is it was certainly a lot tougher and with more responsibility than I have now, despite less than half the salary.
I then somehow got my foot in the door to a career in terms of an internal position with transferrable skills. I've since progressed far more in the next 2 years than I did in the preceeding 5.
There's no reason I couldn't have handled the work I'm doing now at a younger age IMO. Aside from maybe a little more outward confidence, I don't think my skillset is any better now that it was 7 years ago (ignoring stuff that could be picked up in say 3 months of on-the-job training/experience). In fact I've never used anything I learnt at uni since, so even at 18 I would have been capable, if I'd been aware of such jobs 10 years ago.
One thing that surprises me a little is that (some) companies don't pay more attention to employees who have under-utilised skillsets. I'm thinking in terms of giving graduates in low-end jobs opportunities elsewhere within the firm, which should allow them to get an intelligent candidate with knowledge of the company at a knock-down price.
I then somehow got my foot in the door to a career in terms of an internal position with transferrable skills. I've since progressed far more in the next 2 years than I did in the preceeding 5.
There's no reason I couldn't have handled the work I'm doing now at a younger age IMO. Aside from maybe a little more outward confidence, I don't think my skillset is any better now that it was 7 years ago (ignoring stuff that could be picked up in say 3 months of on-the-job training/experience). In fact I've never used anything I learnt at uni since, so even at 18 I would have been capable, if I'd been aware of such jobs 10 years ago.
One thing that surprises me a little is that (some) companies don't pay more attention to employees who have under-utilised skillsets. I'm thinking in terms of giving graduates in low-end jobs opportunities elsewhere within the firm, which should allow them to get an intelligent candidate with knowledge of the company at a knock-down price.
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I've often wondered how people do this? Law and Finance are pretty specialist areas, which usually require a good education in these specific fields. I know a guy that had a phd in physics, yet became a senior web developer. This wasn't a field that required any specific qualifications though - he could program a CMS from the ground up, this was good enough. Yet, without going through years of reading law at Uni, I don't imagine anyone entering this field?
I think the advice in that article is a load of rubbish!
After I graduated University, I spent sometime working abroad in Canada. That looks great on my CV, and is always an excellent talking point. When I came home and was looking for a graduate job, I got a part time bar job. I can fully appreciate that looking for a job is a job in itself, but if you do part time then the employer isn't necessarily going to know and you still show that you have a work ethic.
My brother, who is a lot smarter than me, has a science degree from a good university, a masters degree from another top university and is taking various other qualifications, can't seem to get a job. He has little in the way of work experience though and has spent a long time just bumming around at home... I think this is really detrimental to him finding a job and I think doing anything is better than nothing.
After I graduated University, I spent sometime working abroad in Canada. That looks great on my CV, and is always an excellent talking point. When I came home and was looking for a graduate job, I got a part time bar job. I can fully appreciate that looking for a job is a job in itself, but if you do part time then the employer isn't necessarily going to know and you still show that you have a work ethic.
My brother, who is a lot smarter than me, has a science degree from a good university, a masters degree from another top university and is taking various other qualifications, can't seem to get a job. He has little in the way of work experience though and has spent a long time just bumming around at home... I think this is really detrimental to him finding a job and I think doing anything is better than nothing.
not at all tbh...
not as familiar with law - but AFAIK most of them do a conversions course + LPC - plenty of history grads do this
Accountancy doesn't have any particular requirements either though I think accountancy grads can get some exemptions - still plenty of grads from more academic courses go into accountancy
as for finance - maths and physics post grads are highly sought after in the city. - Tis much easier for a physics post grad to learn about options pricing than it is for a finance post grad to solve complex PDEs etc..
Edit: Beaten to it 
Law you just do a conversion course for, one of my friends doing pyschology is applying to do one, think it only takes a year but I'm not completely sure.
Likewise, lots of the finance professions have their own specific qualifications, doing a related degree means you get exemptions from some of the exams but whilst employers tend to prefer graduates from a "numerical background" it's not necessarily required. And by a numerical background, that's not just finance/economics degrees but most sciences (apparently physics is a favorate for banks to recruit from at least in bristol?), engineering, maths and .. generally any degree where you'll do a least a little maths.
If you don't do something related, you just have to do more exams later. One of my friends friend went straight into a job in finance rather then go to uni at all, though I confess I don't know the full details of how they managed it.
Law you just do a conversion course for, one of my friends doing pyschology is applying to do one, think it only takes a year but I'm not completely sure.
Likewise, lots of the finance professions have their own specific qualifications, doing a related degree means you get exemptions from some of the exams but whilst employers tend to prefer graduates from a "numerical background" it's not necessarily required. And by a numerical background, that's not just finance/economics degrees but most sciences (apparently physics is a favorate for banks to recruit from at least in bristol?), engineering, maths and .. generally any degree where you'll do a least a little maths.
If you don't do something related, you just have to do more exams later. One of my friends friend went straight into a job in finance rather then go to uni at all, though I confess I don't know the full details of how they managed it.
I am pretty sure you cannot trade as an accountant without a degree in accountancy.. it is a protected title, you need to be chartered as with being a conveyancer. So I am not sure how he managed this one.
This is rubbish - they are no more highly sought after by the City than any other good degree from a good institution. They do not want number crunchers, they want good all-rounders who can think logically and analytically.
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I think the crux of this article is taking a bit of a swipe at this kind of attitude typically rolled out by authority figures (parents etc). The idea is that employers will look kindly on any type of work experience favourably.
I'm not 100% convinced myself. I kind of wish I'd held out a bit longer rather than taking the first job that was offered to me, and gone for something with more career prospects. The job I ended up taking was, in my opinion, actually a pretty important, complex and demanding job, but due to the job title and basic outline it became very hard for me to convince prospective employers that it was good experience. There wasn't much in the way of transferrable skills, and I was one of only two people in the company trained to do it. After I switched jobs they paid a specialist contractor megabux to come in and do it (the cheap temp they tried quit after a week due to stress), yet after 2 months he still needed to come to me with questions several times a day. The problem was it was all very proprietary stuff, nothing that I could take to another company and expect them to value highly.
At the time I took the job, I had visions of using it as a platform to gain that important 'work experience', before moving on to better things. Back then I didn't realise that hard work, being excellent at your job and ambition weren't enough to ensure progression - the company also has to be structured in such a way as to give you opportunities.
Overall I think that this is one thing which is often overlooked by students - long term prospects. I don't think that taking a low-end job is necessarily a bad thing, providing that there is a clear career path available for you to develop. For example working as a claims administrator for a large pension/insurance firm, something like that probably gives ample opportunities to the best workers. Whereas jobs in small companies with a flat management structure (i.e. basic job with low educational requirements and low salary, reporting directly to a manager with no positions inbetween) and little in the way of transferrable skills (i.e. a specialist job/division) are something I would advise shying away from. The problem is that most employers will not consider a guy with no management experience currently earning say £12k/year for a management role paying £30k+. Larger companies will probably offer team lead/supervisor roles inbetween which can offer a way forward.
No, you do professional accountancy qualifications while working at the practice. Anyone can do it. You can get a training contract where the employee pays for all your training and then you sit the exams to qualify as an accountant.
Most Quant positions require a Phd in a numerical discipline. I think thats the point he was trying to make.
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dowie said:
No, not at all; out of all the major investment banks, there are three levels at which you can join; Analyst, Associate, Experienced.
As an Analyst, you have graduated with any degree, Bachelor or Master and go straight into this scheme, typically involving 2 - 3 months training.
As an Associate, you have usually done a MBA or alike following any - a post-graduate qualification. Typically involves 1 - 2 months training, but you jump into positions of more responsibility from the go.
Experienced hire - as the name, really. You have or haven't a degree, and are already a good way into your career in whatever area you are applying to, if not being head-hunted for.
Its a shame university can be so expensive, After my ICT degree i wont be able to afford any more education, and i would need a job. But there is so many things i still want to learn, like even though it wouldnt help me with a IT career, i want to learn some more chemistry, physics and math, not for the sake of advancement in a career but just for the sake of learning something i dont know that seems interesting.