An 8.7% drop in applications for University for 2012…

 

So what will those who cannot or choose not to go to University do?

 

According to a recent survey by TMP nearly half of AGR (the Association of Graduate Recruiters) members want to also hire school leavers.

And of the 250,000 A level students just 38,000 are thinking about a career immediately from school. But as we all know with the much higher tuition fees from 2012 it is inevitable that more school leavers will consider going straight into a career (and perhaps coming back to education in a few years).

This group of students creates an opportunity for employers to hire great talent onto school leaver or apprenticeship programmes but also a challenge, namely how to tap into such a much larger market (over 5000 secondary schools) than their HE market (with c100 universities) and how to do it with limited time & resource?

What secondary schools want for their students is not that different to Higher Education. Yes they want careers insights for students but also skills assessment and development and very importantly they want consistent engagement from employers. Schools however face a big challenge in achieving this in that most don’t have the time to fully manage this at the level they would like it delivered. So both employers and schools face a similar conundrum – how to build relationships and meaningfully engage but with very limited time & resource. The view therefore is that this engagement between schools and employers needs brokering.

 

Bright Futures are thus taking their successful HE Society model where we provide employers a ready made platform of talent across UK Universities to tap into and rolling that same approach out into schools. We already have our first school signed up with more wanting to do the same.

 

So work with us at Bright Futures in helping our young people make the right decision, at the right time for the right career.

Have graduates really changed due to the recession?

In 1977 a group of students at Cambridge University started a Society that would give them the opportunity to explore other careers from the obvious choices graduates from such a University would be encouraged to go into, so that ultimately they can make more informed career choices – and the Student Industrial Society was born (now The Bright Futures Society).

Move forward 35 years to yesterday & I am talking to an undergraduate from one of our Societies who has just surveyed 100 students on what they want to do as a career – 60% have a fair idea and 40% have no idea but they all want to meet & talk to a range of employers across a variety of sectors (many untraditional sectors for graduates too) so that can find out for themselves what is right for them. Oh and they also know they need to develop their job hunting and work based skills! 

Yes the recession has changed students in that they are understandably panicing and making more applications (and quality is suffering as a result) but what has not changed is students still want to meet employers and find out for themselves what is right for them AND use the Society to do it. So has anything meaningful changed? From what we see the answer is ‘yes’ because more students than ever are wanting to engage with employers - we have 5 new Societies start up this year already & our membership grew 33% in November alone – and that is one good thing that has come from the recession!