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.