Gissa Job

And so, approximately a gazillion years too late, the government have realised that there is a distinct shortage of graduate-level job opportunities for the hundreds of thousands of chronically-skint youngsters that will be thrust into the real world at the end of this academic year.

It’s a phenomenon that I am painfully aware of; last Thursday saw the completion of my journalism training, and with it, grim and unwelcome confirmation from my tutor that these were not good times for the recently-qualified hack. With 0% of my qualifying classmates (myself included) leaving the course to walk straight into gainful employment, the fact that previous years had seen at least 60% of her qualifying students had done so with jobs secured was ever-so-slightly more worrying.

0%.

Zero. Per. Cent.

Yikes.

You realise you’re up shit creek without a proverbial when the only bright side to your predicament is that at least everyone’s in the same boat. The problem is, the boat’s still in shit creek, and no matter how shitty our hands get, we’re paddling against the current.

No one ever said that getting into journalism was going to be easy; everyone thinks they want to be a journalist, and a great number of people even go so far as to actually try to become one. It’s a tough, virtually impenetrable industry, characterised by incessant rounds of job application and rejection, manipulation and exploitation.

The ‘state of the economy’ doesn’t help. Newspapers are shedding staff quicker than Mahiki chucking out Big Brother contestants on a particularly busy Tuesday night. It’s not a pretty sight.

And yet, once more, here I find myself, standing before the increasingly impregnable obstacle-course that is job seeking. At its best, it is painful, soul-destroying and utterly crushing to one’s self-esteem. At its worst, it is the sort of sick, sadomasochistic practice that is best saved for particularly nasty internet kink-flicks featuring big-eyed schoolgirls with tentacles.

None of this, I realise, is new information – everyone knows how awful looking for a job can be. But it is the one-sidedness of it all that is most frustrating – the impetus on upwards arse-kissing and downwards casualness. It is estimated that the average graduate-level job seeker must send, on average, 70 job applications to secure a single interview. And from personal experience, one can safely expect that from those 69 rejections, only a very small handful will have the common decency to send you any acknowledgement of your brown-nosing, obsequious scrap-begging.

Is it so hard to say ‘thanks, but no thanks?’ Even a curt ‘fuck you’ is preferable to the weight of being ignored. When did it become ok to treat the achievements and successes of others with such utter, mind-boggling disregard?

I know how I sound. I sound like a self-pitying whinge-monger crying for mummy because no one will see me for the superstar I am. But I’m not! I’m not asking Rupert Murdoch to launch himself around the world to nosh me off, using my own flatulent scribblings as a bib – I’m just asking that when broken, broke young people who have busted their bollocks to get a qualification go looking for work, they are treated with ever-so-slightly more respect than a wet fart in white y-fronts.

Perhaps what is most frustrating is that the most appealing roles exist in some sort of employment half-life, offered as internships where ambitious young writers generate revenue for their publications while receiving nothing in return.

There are literally dozens of jobs up for grabs if you don’t mind trawling through an application process that makes The Running Man look like a nice stroll in the park for the opportunity of working for free for six months.

I’m not such a cock as to call it modern-day slavery – it’s not – but what it is, is an utter pisstake, and amounts to the unchallenged theft of intellectual property.

All that the prevalence of the internship system actually achieves is a financially-weighted tier industry – providing the haves with entry-level opportunities that are priced out of the reach of the have-nots. And while I am not suggesting for a second that those who can afford to take these internships, and in doing so work without pay for anything up to six months are in any way less talented than those that cannot afford to do so, it is a bitter pill to swallow that so many are excluded from these opportunities on the grounds that they simply cannot afford to take them.

I’ve done my share of working for free – building up the portfolio of published pieces that were required to pass my journalism training cost me a small fortune. Some publications offer to pay travel expenses – most don’t – up to the point where it actually costs the worker money to work. And while the thrill of publication is something I hope will not quickly fade, it is small comfort when faced with the fact I can no longer afford to take the tube to visit museums I have reviewed, or buy a pint in bars I’ve recommended to my readers.

A fantastic, talented and pro-active friend of mine, who has worked at some of the world’s top fashion magazines, has, now as a fully-trained journalist, found herself once more slogging her guts out for free. It’s absurd, and it’s unfair. The reality of the situation is that the industry needs a shake-up. It’s taken a battering of late, but the solution is not slamming shut the doors and preventing the influx of fresh talent, opening them only to let in those wealthy enough to not need the jobs anyway.

Something needs to change, or, sadly, the writing really will be on the wall…

[Sorry, boys and girls, I realise that was not particularly fluffy, or indeed funny, but if I read ‘this is an unpaid position for a period of 6 months’ once more without letting off some steam I was going to throw myself off a bridge… Phew.]