Julian Tomlinson
Are employers dismissing jobseekers because they don’t have a university degree? What about considering life and work experience and other qualifications?
IF A GRADUATE CAN SAY THEY LEARNED LESS IN THEIR FIRST YEAR WORKING THAN WHAT THEY LEARNED IN THREE YEARS AT UNI, THEY ARE IN THE MINORITY.
ONE of the big indicators of how out of touch politicians, millennials and their enablers are is the country’s obsession with university.
The Federal Government has unveiled a plan to fund youth work experience while they’re on the dole.
The move has been howled down by academics – and, sadly, young people themselves – as slave labour and even against the law.
This highlights just how delusional many millennials have been allowed to become.
Brought up on a diet of “you must go to uni”, and “the government will look after you if you make bad choices”, the thought of work experience sends them into fits.
Hell, they’re even getting paid to do work experience under this scheme, whereas most people back in the day had to do it for free and were grateful for the chance.
For the record, I don’t have a degree. When I finished Year 12 at St Brendan’s College Yeppoon 23 years ago, probably less than three-quarters of my grade went to uni, and most of those who did were studying the sciences, property valuing, computers, accounting or teaching.
A few managed to land entry-level jobs at banks, some went to trades ap- prenticeships, some returned to their family properties, and some went seeking fortune and fame overseas (one bloke still hasn’t come back).
I got accepted into uni but then was offered a cadetship at the Innisfail Advocate and eagerly accepted it, but I’d have virtually no chance today of getting a news job without a degree.
The same goes for almost every white-collar industry in Australia.
A good mate was recently made redundant from a finance company after 20 years in which he started at the bottom and worked his way up to senior management.
His work history is exemplary and his references glowing. But he doesn’t have a degree and has made it to just one interview in about 40 similar jobs he’s applied for.
Most of the time, he hasn’t even it past the first round, receiving notification of his failure within 24 hours of submitting his applications.
If you look at 99 per cent of whitecollar job ads, they say applicants must have a degree or demonstrable experience in the field.
But for more and more middleaged and senior jobseekers, the “demonstrable experience” requirement is nothing more than hogwash.
This obsession with university is consigning thousands of potentially great employees with peerless practical experience to the scrapheap in favour of graduates with a few letters after their names.
There’s also the issue of graduates having to be retrained once they get a job because their degree didn’t equip them with the right “real world” training to hit the ground running.
If a graduate can honestly say they learned less in their first year working than what they learned in three years at uni, they are in the minority.
This obsession is plainly discriminatory. If your high school marks aren’t good enough to get into uni, it’s no longer as easy to just start as a junior bank teller and learn on the job.
TAFE is an option but again that’s more study and we’re talking about people who have shown studying isn’t