Student Slavery? Or Corporate Kindness?

Unless you know someone who knows someone who knows someone, the ‘placement’ is a core part of breaking into the publishing industry.

Many publishing houses have throngs of students fitting into their fixed work placement roles all year round. Or in other words, at any given time you can walk into a publishing firms office and find at least one person who is working for FREE.

I’ve coordinated teams of voluntary workforce in the past, and they’ve been crucial to the projects that they were involved in. During my own placement hunt this week I was infuriated, at first, to see that some offices endorse up to half a year’s free labour from work hungry students who are hoping for a job opportunity.

Surely allowing this industry to employ a student slave for 6 months (while paying only for the odd tube journey) is deplorable? Or is it?

The placement is a two-way trip. For the publisher they are inviting an unskilled person into their team who might make mistakes. For the work-experience-seeker they are gaining valuable experience.

But lets not underestimate the skill of the volunteer. Just because they’re working for free doesn’t mean they might not be excellent. Yet the Hokey Cokey of short placements does mean that just as a candidate settles in, they’re off out the door and in comes the new one. So longer unpaid placements might be good for standards.

But even with two-week stints, if you offset the time spent on supporting those on work placement with the yearly productivity they offer to a firm, it’s clearly worth it. And let’s face it; if it wasn’t worth it for those who are nursing the bottom line, placements wouldn’t exist at all.

My fury at these lengthy placements quickly turned to passivity. I went from thinking ‘how dare they expect so much time’ to fantasising about ‘… the opportunity it might offer’.

The corporate kindness of the publishers, to offer a window of hands on learning, is gold dust to the student. I’m still left wondering if we students are happy to work for free for this long because it’s the only way in? Or because of the self-development the opportunity itself offers?

Perhaps it’s both.

And I’m torn between the immoral aspects of expecting free work for so long (not to mention cutting out those who can’t afford to do this) and the individual value that these placements offer students, who are in the business of deciding where they see themselves within the industry.

Graduate Entrepreneurialism is The Future.

The weekend began at the NAWE conference in a comfortable Cheltenham hotel (thanks to Liverpool John Moores University). I was talking at the conference with Alicia Stubbersfield (poet and Lecturer) and James Shaw (ex student, rapper and young offenders officer) about a module taught at LJMU called 'The Writer At Work.'

This module brings writers from across a broad range of disciplines to come in and talk to students about how they (as writers) make their ca$h. The novelist Niall Griffiths always goes down a storm, but other writers might be writing for screen, running workshop groups or working as publishers.

The students are then asked to 'start a project'. The idea is that they use the skills they have as creative writers to plan, and then create something. From poetry nights, plays performed in swimming pools, to starting up monthly magazines - some of these projects come to life. The success of this module at the university (and the feel from the talk we gave) comes down to the fact that Creative Writing Graduates are an entrepreneurial bunch.

After talking to charming lectures from institutions all over the UK and even from as far as Australia I was left with the feeling that there is hope yet! All of the academics were armed with stories of how 'involved' their students get with arts programs and projects. Creative Writing students are engaging in further development not by taking the usual 'work placement' route other students do, but rather by using their own strengths and passions to put things out into the community. This is at the heart of the Module taught at LJMU.

But how does the job market see graduates? Take a look at this recent feature on the problems that graduates face at the end of study:



As doors are closing and the bar is raised because of over qualified candidates taking jobs which they would not have sniffed at in the past, I do see a thick grey hopelessness around my graduate friends. Yet it's the most entrepreneurial of them, the risk takers and the thinkers that are quickly on the way to the careers which they're after.


Keep the faith.

Why Enter the Blogisphere?

I finish my degree in Creative Writing and I turn to the world and say 'I'm here! Employ Me!'. The world takes me in for a second, my lack of height, the brown of my eyes, and then says 'Oh sorry, that's really not enough.'

My point here in Another Graduate is not to rant about the fact that life for graduates is such a hopeless struggle. I'm not going to obsess that the job market is cowering in a corner somewhere and barks every time we (graduates) try to go anywhere near it. Nor am I going to lay down the feeling of horror and sadden which I feel every time I have to go and serve another bottle of Pinot Noir to a condescending city banker over conversations that take the shape of 'too many people simply have degrees these days, price them out I say.'

Here I'll simply recount my efforts to educate and negotiate myself into the career of my choosing. I'll log the work placements which I'll freely give my time to, in the hope of toting-up some golden experience. I might even consider how I packed my life into a few boxes and moved it from Liverpool to London to seek my (job finding) fortune. I'll talk about the Masters I'm taking to try an make myself 'a more attractive candidate' and convey myself in that dull language which only recruitment speaks in.

Over the next year, as I blog there can be only two outcomes: I will find the job I'm after, or I shall continue to be one of the many graduates working in versions of Pizza Hut all over the world, dreaming of a better way of life.