New Graduate Job Options?

It's been far too long since we had a newspaper article telling us that we've too many graduates and that everyone ought to become electricians instead, so thanks to the Guardian, and to the Louise Tickle for this article from Saturday. Tickle writes interesting articles, and this is no exception, but I do have my reservations....

Buried in the piece, is the extremely interesting and sensible message put forward by Andy Powell of Edge (beware, Flash website), that it's foolish to see manual or vocational careers as second best for graduates, but it dilutes this excellent point by holding on to the 'too many graduates, not enough jobs' message.

Then we go to Iain Macdonald at the Electrical Contractors Association, who informs us that 'an apprentice electrician....will enter the job market on around £17,000. By the end of the first year, as a qualified apprentice, they will be on £22,000-£25,000."

So an electrician starts on just around the average going rate for a new graduate (£17,029, which covers all jobs), and then go on to what is, on the face of it, a pretty healthy wage. So why not rush out and become electricians? Good question. Because, as always, there's more to it than that.

According to the ASHE, the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, from the government, the median salary for someone in 'Skilled metal and electrical trades' in 2005 was £23,238 (you need Acrobat and Excel to get this link to work. Or you can just trust me). But isn't that supposed to be the salary they earn after just one year? No denying that it's a pretty decent salary, though.

But how does that compare with the average graduate salary? Well, let's be kind to the electricians, and look at the same survey, and look at the lowest earning category that contains mainly graduates - the "Associate professional and technical occupations". Median salary is £24,048, which rises to £26,247 for full time employees. That's because in these jobs, loads of people can work part-time- if they have a family, say. For your skilled metal and electrical workers, just 4.6% work part time - keeping that median salary high, whilst 19.6% of associate professionals do. So not only do you get paid more, but you can work more flexibly.

And it takes 2, count them, 2 graduates who have chosen to enter an industry that is currently in vogue (there haven't been too many Shakespeare adaptations set in a firm of civil engineers on BBC2 recently), claims that the restaurant industry has "job security", which must be exciting news for all those casual workers, and attempts to build a trend out of it. This is a bugbear for people like me who prefer data to anecdotes when we want to demonstrate to lots of people (like, say, a quarter of a million graduates) the pros and cons of different choices.

So the key point is that graduates have more options than what are largely regarded as 'standard' graduate jobs, and that these jobs shouldn't be regarded as second rate.

But the way it is initially put across looks rather negative, and it is rather selective about what is presented and is not stated. I hope readers take the sensible message from the piece and don't just read it as a 'going to university is a waste of time' article.