InAzerbaijan - In Our Opinion: Is it difficult to get a job when you leave education? Do you often find work in your preferred field?

Name: Charlotte 

Age: 17

Hometown: Romford, England

The current state of the job market in the UK means that it is becoming substantially harder to pursue a fulfilling career which intertwines your preferred field and a good working salary.

Often, after studying for months on end to obtain a degree for over £9000 a year in tuition fees alone it does not amount to you getting your dream job. Yes a degree helps get the ball rolling on the job market but not the market of working in your specialised subject.

This is especially the case with subjects that fall under the arts and humanities. Although it is still hard to get jobs in the sciences and you have to work hard to get a job in the industry there are still plenty of opportunities available to you whereas in areas such as the humanities jobs are sparse.

The larger areas in which you can obtain jobs in these subjects is often teaching but for an impatient, ‘not good with kid’s’ person like me that narrows your options even further. The subject I’m aiming to study at university is probably one of the hardest to get a job which is directly linked to my degree, although there may be aspects of it in my future career it is unlikely, unless I brave being a teacher, that I will ever work in that field. Quite simply there is not enough funding put into to careers which incorporate the arts or history or English or other humanity subjects instead everybody wants the next technological advancement or the simpler fields are in need of more workers. Leaving those who have studied a subject they have loved for years having to leave that love as a hobby and move into ‘the real world.’

Furthermore especially in this era it is becoming increasingly difficult to get work straight out of finishing education. With employers looking for the next best investment in humans it is hard to get a job based on your degree and your degree alone, it doesn’t matter if you’ve spent 3 years studying your specialised area intricately and with passion unless you worked in a coffee shop at some point you are not getting that job because you need ‘experience’. And even worse than that you aren’t getting that job at the coffee shop unless you’ve had ‘experience’, 15 years of experience, despite being 22 at that moment in time and not having known how to handle a latte machine at the age of 7. Of course this is an over exaggeration but it is a metaphor for a real life situation graduates face.

You need experience outside of your degree but opportunities to have that experience is hard to come by and ultimately it means that you may not get your dream job because you don’t have enough of that impossible experience to achieve it. The unfortunate situation is that most employers don’t know how hard it is for students to meet their standard in a world of a cut job market and little opportunity and not many post graduate or young adult can work as an intern for 0 wages and no confirmation of an end position. It is a hard situation that nearly every young person has to go through either leave their preferred field behind and get a stable job or peruse it with no guarantee of a positive outcome.