OrientationObservationIn-depth interviewsDocument analysis and semiologyConversation and discourse analysisSecondary Data
SurveysExperimentsEthicsResearch outcomes
Conclusion
The Graduate's Work study which explored the nature of graduate employment focusing on perceptions of employers at both senior management and line management levels, as well as the views of recent graduate and non-graduate employees. The interviewers had a check list of areas to explore in semi-structured interviews, which varied in length from half an hour to three hours.
The following transcript was taken from part of one of the 258 in-depth interviews conducted for the study.
The interview is with a senior manager in a major technical business. Earlier questions have ascertained the manager's role and that the company has large numbers of graduates, including staff with PhDs.
Interviewer: Could you identify what skills and abilities you have been looking for in graduates over the past ten years?
Senior Manager: In research group it is obviously specialised technical skills, and within the community as a whole we do recruit other graduates for management trainee positions and there we are looking for almost anything would do in the type of degree, but we are looking for people with a commercial or business background, so quite a lot of those recruited into the management side would go on to do MBAs and things like that. I would say that graduate recruitment is by and large a technical matter and the graduates are recruited in through the research and technical departments and then they go on to management functions elsewhere. We are a technology-based company. Reflecting over the last five years I think it is only the research and technology teams that have recruited, almost every other department has recruitment blocks, so the only entry has been through research and therefore technical.
Interviewer: Has there been any down sizing?
Senior Manager: Yes, we were something like 17,000/18,000 three or four years ago and we are now down to 15,000, perhaps less than that. The company is responding to the industry changes, and the industry changes are significant in the electricity supply industry due to privatisation and the electricity bidding pool and that has had a big effect on generators and trying to reduce their costs, and therefore the costs of their supplies.
Interviewer: Are there any skills and attributes that you look for other than technical, i.e. communication, etc?
Senior Manager: All the soft skills we do look for in people, and they tend to be skills that distinguish employees between each other, those that have them and are skilled in using them rise through the organisation, those that don't have them and are unskilled either leave or don't make a lot of progress, so certainly they are very important, and when you talk to graduates about how they can progress in the company you often talk about those skills, but when you recruit it is not easy to be sure they have them, and so your first criteria in recruitment is more about technical ability in our case and general suitability. That is not to say that recruiters have not tried to look for these soft skills in their recruitment drives, I think they have changed from single interviews to workshop type recruiting where they ask the applicants to do a range of team exercises and see how they perform, it is too early to say whether that has made a big difference to the calibre of recruit, because for the first two or three years the line managers will assess them based on their technical competence, their brain power.
Interviewer: Do you see that changing in the future, the kind of skills and abilities that you have looked for?
Senior Manager: I think we will look for more complete people, more rounded people that have these skills, we will still recruit on the basis of knowledge, I think like a lot of big companies it is clear that the future for us does depend on being a very responsive organisation and that leverages the collective knowledge of this workforce, it is less about brute force and more about intellectual power and responsiveness of the organisation and in our case we are about solving problems in the nuclear area, and we need people who can think cleverly technically, and then in addition they need all the interpersonal skills.
Interviewer: Do you think the rise in graduates coming on to the labour market has encouraged employers and organisations to employ graduates rather than non-graduates?
Senior Manager: I am sure it must appear that way but I don't think it is a deliberate policy on our behalf. It is hard not to recruit graduates now because going back 20 years where there was a clear distinction between a graduate and a skilled technician and artisan, skilled worker, there is no longer any distinction between graduates and skilled technicians, and increasingly good skilled artisans are showing all the capabilities of poor graduates, so the boundaries between them in real terms is blurring and therefore the focus is much more on employing or recruiting the right kind of people, and you start with graduates because most people who apply now seem to have a degree since they have changed the organisation of degree giving, a lot more universities being able to grant their own degrees, it means it is very difficult to recruit anyone over the age of 20 into a first job without a degree but that doesn't mean they have got very good degrees.
