The latest job trend - insecurity!

Is your job on the line? It probably is, whether you are working on a permanent, casual, or contract basis. I wasn't around during the Great Depression, and it sounds like it was pretty bad for a lot of Australians, but I think the outlook for workers today is equally grim, but in a very different, twenty-first century way.

I've seen a lot of change in the Australian labour market since I was a fresh, bright-eyed nineteen year-old clerk in the Federal Department of Employment (then it was tied to Immigration, interestingly). This was my entry point into my own world of work and my initiation as a budding career development practitioner. While I thought I was just having fun working with larrikins in the Commonwealth Employment Service I learned the ropes of social security benefits, government funded employment programs, jobless statistics and industry reports, and, even more importantly, I learned a lot about people and what they want and need from jobs.

I have often made predictions about what was going to happen in the labour market, with some accuracy, but mainly to myself and family members, or to colleagues and friends during philosophical discussions. I have never thought to put out a prediction publicly. I have never seen the value in it, especially when the outlook does not look good. However, I am going public with this prediction, actually, in the hope that it does not eventuate.

I predict that, for the average Australian worker, real wages will fall significantly over the next five years. Tony Abbott wants Australians to earn less, and, like it or not, what Tony wants, Tony seems to get. One way or another, he is definitely not the Australian worker's friend. The 457 visa floodgate has opened and willing workers are pouring in from overseas. Didn't you notice all those people flying in while the Liberals have been so busy announcing their successes in stopping what  was always a paltry number of boat arrivers? Anyway, these 457 visa holders are very happy to work in crummy conditions for far less than the minimum wage, as recent 'alleged' news stories about Koreans working for a certain mining company illustrate . Unions have shown little grunt or ability to change or end this situation and will not, at least as long as we have Liberals in power.

I'm obviously not happy with our neo-conservative political situation but I am going big picture here, way above the blame game. So, back to the prediction. Wages will be cut for Australians who want to compete with the incoming workers, but so will jobs for Australians. Like manufacturing, white collar jobs are heading overseas. Health care and insurance claims are processed in India and Japan, while your call centre is in the Philippines.

Alongside this, I predicted a while back that as the 21st century advanced, more and more Australians would be working casually or under contract; that there would be less jobs in large organisations and more need for outsourced labour. This is already becoming obviously the trend. Cutbacks and retrenchments (or is that right-sizing) are everywhere.

We want all of our young people to get good vocational training, but where will they find jobs? Australia is a living conundrum. On one hand, we already have far too many graduates than there are available jobs.On the other hand, we need more teachers, nurses, doctors, paramedics, but we have education systems that fail to supply these in the right proportion, and career opportunities at the end do not match our actual need.

For the seventy-five percent of us who don't have a degree, plus those who do not work in the area in which we qualified, one of the chief barriers to success in job search is that 'demonstrated skills' drives the whole recruitment process. This means, people are competing with hundreds, possibly thousands of others, for jobs that have an extremely 'tight' set of required skills (which is heavily enforced by the Applicant Tracking System) - unfortunately the notion of transferable skills has not penetrated the minds of most recruiters and hirers. For example, a client came to see me recently, she had worked as a bookkeeper for many years using a range of software, but not MYOB. She had absolutely awesome bookkeeping skills. After more than 200 applications she was still not hired because, rather than asking questions that would identify her ability to use MYOB, the questions stopped after 'Have you used MYOB?' and her truthful answer was, 'No'. I sighed, gave her a free copy of MYOB I had lying around and told her to go home and set herself up a home accounting system. She did. We wrote on her resume that she had used MYOB. She applied for a job. At the next interview, able to answer 'Yes, I have used MYOB', she got the job. Interestingly, they did not ask one more MYOB-related question.

One of our big problems is the mismatch of qualifications and available jobs. We have a large pool of workers trained for jobs that don't exist.We have jobs going that people could actually do well, but the selection process begins with a particular qualification (even for lowly clerical roles, older workers with years of experience are shut out because they don't have a Certificate in Business Administration).

Does the answer lie in retraining? Retraining for what?  Besides the fact that spending 6-12 months studying something you already know is ludicrous, how do we know that next year the benchmark for entrants will not be a Diploma, that the Certificate in Business Administration is all but useless? How can we be sure jobs will be available in any other current line of work?

Retraining is simply not an option for many people, especially if it means sacrificing opportunities to job hunt. Studying is far less palatable when you are fighting to keep a roof over your head, and with funding cuts to training programs anyway, it's not hard to see why most people aren't warming to the prospect of undergoing lengthy self-funded training programs with dubious employment possibilities at the end.

Not long ago, employers used to train people on the job, nowadays they will be more likely to purchase a product and leave it up to the person operating it to work it out, or if they are lucky, they may get a few hours of vendor training thrown into the purchase price. When they hire someone new, it becomes a requirement to already know the product - the employer is not interested in wasting time training a new person, they want them pre-manufactured.

So, in summary I further predict that within the next five years we will have a large pool of workers with outdated or unusable skills that do not match employers' requirements. This is a safe prediction, because it is already happening. But this situation will get much, much worse as no one, not even me, can guarantee what course a person should do to ensure any level of job security.

A also predicted a while back that as the 21st century advanced, more and more Australians would be working casually or under contract, that there would be less jobs in large organisations and more need for outsourced labour. This is already becoming obviously the trend. While for some of us, the jobs we had are still needed, we are just doing it another way, more Australians are becoming, effectively, itinerant workers, at the mercy of the on-hire process. Those of us who want to take some control are opting to go into business for themselves. These new-age entrepreneurs are often reluctant business people, and are ill-equipped to handle the rigours of financial and business management, not to mention marketing, administration and tax accounting.

We currently have a labour market in chaos. It is disconnected, unpredictable and constantly shifting. My prediction is that it will get a whole lot worse, and that there will be many casualties. For individuals who find themselves in the middle of this maelstrom, unsure which way to go, I offer this advice: Stop and breathe, accept that many things are out of your control, then accept that you must take control of your own life. This is your anchor. This means not rushing into anything, especially not because someone on the TV or radio tells you that you too can have a career in aged care or personal training (some of us will, but most won't). Take stock of your successes, and eliminate from your thoughts the bits of the 'old you' that are hampering you in the present. Times are changing; you are reshaping yourself. Look around with fresh eyes at what is happening in your local area, or in a new area you might want to move to, and try to identify some areas of interest for you. This is called 'environment scanning' which is the topic of my next blog.

Adios for now
Julie

The Trouble With Careers

Careers are curious beasts, they can spin off in weird directions without much warning. For example, you might come into work one morning to find someone has cleared out your desk for you, which probably means you have been made redundant (unless you have been found out for doing something illegal, in which case I have no sympathy). Or you might find out, as a colleage of mine did a few years back, that your body has said 'enough is enough', and announced through a stroke or heart attack that it is no longer willing to do what you have been asking it to do.

Sometimes, the change is positive, but the ramifications can be just as derailing. Take me, for example. You may have noticed that it has been around six months since I posted my last blog. This is because last November I had a career change - a big, unplanned, unexpected and unprepared-for career change that sent me spinning off in a new direction.

This new opportunity is something I have been calling 'the job of my dreams' since I first saw it posted. I simply had to have it. I went all out for it, even though I was not technically even allowed to apply for it - fortunately I was the only applicant! Maybe I scared everyone else off, or maybe this was a true moment of happenstance in my life.

The job itself - well if I told you the actual responsibilities you might wonder what all the fuss is about. And to tell the truth I would not probably be wanting to do this job for the next ten years - but it is what it represents that is so mindblowing. It is a culmination of everything I have been working through in my life, drawing on all my skills and interests, and challenging enough to maintain my interest. It is a brand new role, fresh and alive for me to put my mark on it, to show how I can create something and make it work.

Suffice to say that I have loved every minute of the past six months, I have not had one single day of not wanting to go to work, which is in itself a first. The best thing about my job is my team of 8 staff; the next is the management team that I form a part of, which is highly supportive and innovtive as well as providing me the time I need get on with my own job. The third thing is that there is a large a variety of components, and fourthly I guess that I am never bored - a big plus for me, as boredom is my enemy.

I do truly feel blessed to have had the opportunity at least once in my life to absolutely love everything about my job, and to get paid for it s well! Needless to say, with a more-than-fulltime job my work with private clients, along with my writing plans, have been temporarily shelved. I say temporarily because I know that one day I will go back to these, they are part of me now, even when I am not doing them.

So you might be wondering why have I called this post 'The Trouble with Careers'? I suppose I have been thinking about why careers are problematic for so many of us. When we have a great job, we worry about losing it. When we are unhappy with our job, we might fail to see and make the most of opportunities. We might even worry that we don't deserve a great career, or what we think is going to be a great career turns out all wrong.

Sorry if this all sounds a bit weird and complex, but what I really mean is that true careers are transformational - they change us, help us grow and become better people, and we make them happen by our attitude. This has reinforced what I call my life's work, which is summarised in another blog storypractitioner.blogspot.com - check it out if you want to see what I mean.

If I can backtrack a little to September last year - despite all the successes I had experienced in my career and life to that point, I was not a happy chicken. I was bored, restless, wondering if there was anything left in the world to excite me. I knew I needed a new challenge, some kind of project, but I had no idea what this looked like. I talked to everyone who would listen about this and got a lot of advice, all of which I ignored, and some job offers, which I rejected - I knew that I had to wait for the right thing to come along. And it did.

Was getting this job an act of desperation, and I am making more of it than I really should? (after all at the moment I am only on a contract for another three months). Was it just a lucky break, or true happenstance? Does it have something to do with being incredibly focussed? Or can we base this success on some strategic planning, networking and clarifying my career direction?

I don't know the answers to these questions, but I am loving my job, loving life, and loving me for probably the first time in my life. Am I fooling myself? Let me know, honestly, what you think?

If any of what I have said is meaningful to you, I want to know. For example if you have ever had (or currently have) your dream job - even if it was not a forever job, you know like that short term relationship that was a mindblowing experience while it lasted. Or is this something you likewise crave, so much that you are no longer counting down the days till your next holiday? And have you felt transformed in any way by your career? I'd love to hear from you.

Asking a Monkey for Career Help - Why Not?

A much-needed five week European vacation provided the distance from my work that I needed to regain perspective. It reminded me just how important taking time out is for body, mind and soul.

Unfortunately, taking a few weeks off from the daily grind is something most people believe is impossible these days. We have been conned into feeling that if we are away from our workplaces for more than a week, our jobs, livelihoods and lifestyles are jeopardised. In fact, the opposite is true - without taking time out to recharge we become stale, less competent and likely to make mistakes. Worse still, we become anxious and fretful, but don't see any of this until we gain some distance. Without gaining new perspective, ironically, many of us find our careers pulled from under us (if you don't know what I mean, ask Kevin Rudd - or you may already be saying, 'Kevin who?').

So if you are thinking you can't afford to take time off to get away from your normal surroundings and routine, I challenge you to rethink this now. How much money and time are you spending just propping up your current existence: eating out because you are too tired to shop or cook, gym fees that are hardly ever used, retail therapy or doctor's visits and pills?

Besides taking time off for some R and R, another way to revitalise is to review your career at regular intervals - once or twice a year, if you are not making significant changes. Obviously, if you are contemplating or going through a career change, then there are other things you will need to do as well.

One thing you can do is attend a careers expo. During the last weekend in Melbourne (that's Melbourne, Australia for international readers), I coordinated a stand at the Reinvent Your Career Expo, which is now in its third year. A group of career development practitioners volunteered their time to provide career check-ups and resume reviews, as well as conducting seminars and workshops on a range of issues. We know we were appreciated by those we helped, but we couldn't help everyone, and it was quite obvious to us that a lot of people are lost and confused about their career paths,and about how to get the right kind of assistance.

Our own little poll of people in a workshop we held in the final hour of the expo indicated that expecting to get actual career help from most standholders is, apparently, a waste of time. You might as well go to the zoo and ask the resident babboon. These people had come to the expo because they wanted or needed to do something different with their lives; they wanted something to excite them, to transform their careers - but had found little that was helpful.

They told us there were a lot of course providers wanting to engender interest in the programs they had on offer, others were selling resume or coaching services, some government departments were advertising themselves.

Tragically, no one (besides us) seemed interested in helping these people to actually reinvent their careers. All the other stallholders, apparantly, were self-interested and not concerned at all about the individuals who approached them. This is probably why our stand was always the busiest. Those of us who volunteered our time felt the real pain of those we talked with, and it was good to send quite a few people away with some concrete ideas and follow-up actions.

During and immediately following the expo, I have been wondering why people come to careers expos believing that they will get the answers to their career dilemmas. Most often, they don't and can't. Is it something to do with the way these events are advertised? Perhaps. Here are two reasons why I think careers expos fail to deliver on expectations.

1. Careers expos, like all expos, are essentially large marketing exercises. Instead of a 2 by 2 column in a newspaper, a billboard, or a radio or TV spot, expo organisers sell space for a limited period so that organisations and their potential clients can come together to achieve a common purpose. The reason this fails is because visitors expect something more, a community service perhaps - people to hold their hands and walk them into their new careers. Thus, they do no preparation, and wander from stand to stand hoping that someone will appear, god-like, with a job that is tailor made for them. Reinventing one's career is something that must start and end with the individual. Most of the work that needs to be done happens before and after the expo.

2. The second reason careers expos fail to meet expectations is that people who are wanting to change, improve, or just manage their careers, tend to seek help from all the wrong places. Unfortunately the career development industry - my industry, that requires post-graduate qualifications and experience - is still not understood at all well. This is compounded by the fact that many other industries use the word 'career' in their own titles and advertising, which misleads people into believing that they are career professionals.

For example, recruiters are not terribly interested in a candidate's career, other than whether it is a match for the positions they have to fill; nor do they usually know how to help them with a career change. (I say 'on the whole' because I have friends who are both recruiters and career counsellors/coaches, but these are exceptions to the rule). But people still complain about the recruiter who did not show much interest in them or empathy about their situation. Recruiters are not in the empathy business, they are in the business or getting candidates to pass on to their employer clients.

A course provider is not interested in a person's career development either, they really only want to fill their courses, so a person visiting their stand is a 'potential student',and if that person is uncertain or presents a difficult career dilemma, they will soon be relegated to the 'too hard' basket. This makes good sense; getting people into classes ensures their institution remains viable and they get to keep their jobs.

Do go to careers expos, they can be really good if you go prepared and if you know how to use them well. Go with the idea of 1) getting ideas that you can follow up on, 2) finding specific information on a career or job that you find interesting or 3) asking some direct questions that are targetted to the professionals you will be talking to. Don't go to an expo thinking you will be handed a job - you will most probably be disappointed. When it comes to managing your career or landing that job, hard work on your part is required.

There are no shortcuts, but getting the right kind of help can really provide a boost. Qualified and experienced career development practitioners are available - they may be a bit hard to find, but if you contact us at Career Dimensions we will do our best to make that part a whole lot easier.

What's the story?

This week I have been preparing a workshop for the International Career Conference in Wellington, New Zealand on 20 November. The topic of this workshop is about using narrative, or story, to assist people to create career change.

I have always loved stories. An avid reader when I was young, I literally devoured books, continually exhausting my parents with requests for new paperbacks. At eleven, I started saving my pocket money to buy them myself: Anna Karenina and the two volumes of War and Peace were the first on my list(this was obviously my Russian phase). Before that it was the English classics, such as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Shakespeare took hold of me at around 12, followed by sci-fi (everything John Wyndham wrote), detective stories (Agatha Christie - who else?) and the poets - Robert Frost, TS Eliot and Banjo Patterson etc. saw me through to fifteen or so. Flaubert (Madame Bovary), Albert Camus (L'Etranger) and other assorted French writers caught my attention a bit later (part of my appetite for anything French. I must have been an unusual child.

These days I rarely have time to scan a page or two of a feature in the weekend magazines (although today I managed to read a piece on James Packer's life from last week's paper from beginning to end, each paragraph increasing my belief that the world really has gone mad, one person with all that wealth to squander on not just one luxury cruiser, but two, and of course then there is the stable of jet planes, houses in all the right places, la-de-da!).

I digress. But, like most people I guess, with each year that passes I seem to be able to find less less time (and inclination) for reading huge tomes (except for the years spent as an undergraduate in my early thirties). The fact is, I have been provided with stories aplenty to maintain my interest, real life ones which are really so much more fascinating, and yes, stranger, than fiction.

The stories I am talking about are truly remarkable - stories of escape from war torn regions and senseless torture, of starting life all ovaer again in alien countries with absolutely nothing, often not even a photo of the loved ones they had left behind, or who had perished. I've heard people talk about how they have bounced back and reinvent themselves after injuries and illnesses, financial ruin, disgrace and shame (eat your heart out, James Packer), in ways that are more than a match for the fictional characters that pervaded my youth.

Many of these stories have been told by people who have come to me as career counselling and coaching clients, some as government employment services clients, so I can't relate any of these here. Others are private clients, whose confidentiality I must also respect. But they are stories of adventure, crime, passion, anguish, death and despair, and above all, victory.

I am sorry that I have missed so many marvellous opportunities to document at least some of the stories I have been so privileged to hear. Hopefully one day I will get to write a work that incorporates some elements from them. The world certainly could do with some real life role models - everyday people doing extraordinary things, to rekindle our faith in humanity if nothing else.

Lately I have been doing a lot of thinking about the link between story, narrative and career. I have been thinking that, for each person, there is the story about their life and career, and there is another story that sits in the background, that actually drives us, tells us what is important, and guides us as we make important decisions. A lot of the time, when we make a choice about something, in the final countdown we say we decided on instinct. I am wondering whether this instinct is actually something that is primal, deeply rooted in our psyches.

Telling stories is part of who we are, our human-ness. Modern life has robbed us of the power of the story, through corporatisation, socialisation and taboos that tell us what we can and can't say, verbally and on the page or screen. To a large extent, we have lost our instinct, our roots, and we don't even realise it because in this high-paced world we do not allow ourselves the time to reflect and explore the inner recesses. Everything is show, our careers are all show. If you disagree, and think your career reflects the person you truly are, let me know!

How important is workplace fit?

After they receive instruction on how to take details of a job vacancy, one of the first things new recruitment consultants are taught is how to find the ideal candidate. They are taught to shortlist based on these three criteria:

1. Can they do it? (i.e. the job, which means they have the skills, experience and other requirements outlined)

2. Will they do it? (i.e. do they appear highly motivated, will they be happy to do the tasks, work at that level etc.)

3. Will they fit in? (i.e. to the workplace, with the team, will they be accepted by others)

Of all of these, No. 3 is the most difficult for recruiters and employers to get right. I am sure we all agree that a person who is a good fit will be happier, work more productively and probably stay on longer than someone who is a square peg in a round hole.

Anecdotal evidence from colleagues in the recruitment industry indicates that the 'best fit' criteria is fraught with difficulties. I would be interested to receive some real data if anyone knows of any research into this area.

The issues created by 'bad fit' employees include: excessive days off, poor performance, poor output, teamwork hampered by delays, right through to conflict and outright sabotage, all of which have a devastating affect on the bottom line.

So why do hirers get this wrong so often? There are many reasons, and not all of these can be blamed on human error. For instance, a couple of years ago, before the GFC, there simply were not enough people applying for positions, let alone ideal ones.

Now, we seem to have the opposite problem. With excellent candidates coming up for a large number of jobs, it is often a matter of choosing between two or more who seem equally ideal. While a recruiter may tend to place too much emphasis on assessments and impersonal processes, they will generally have a greater ability to remain objective than their client, who is more inclined to
- recruit 'people like us'
- look at the past, trying to fill a former employee's shoes, rather than focusing on how the replacement can help the organisation move forward into the future
- spend time gaining 'intelligence' from people in their network rather than relying on their own gut instincts
- select the person who interviews best (i.e. who appeals to their ego), rather than the one who is more likely to work hardest and most productively

Compounding the 'fitness' issue is that ephemeral issue of blatent discrimination - yes, it still exists, just look around a range of workplaces with eyes open to find real evidence that we have not become any more tolerant of people who are different to us, or aware of the negative results of prejudice. This is now more heavily cloaked, because we are sufficiently savvy to avoid expressing openly discriminatory remarks. With Recruitment 101 firmly embedded in their brains, no real data to work with, and an unwillingness to harm their relationship with their client,recruiters are often left to second-guess the 'best fit' part, usually based on their own preconceptions, on a hunch of how their client thinks.

So what is the best way to determine 'best fit'? I believe this has less to do with the physical attributes of the candidate OR their cultural background than with the prejudices of the hirer. For example, do they avoid hiring someone from India or Venezuela because of a preconceived idea about the standard of work they can expect, or the time they might front up after lunch? Do they fail to see the possibilities in any female candidates because 'they have always had a male' in the past? Do they eliminate a person who worked in an organisation they don't respect, when the reason that person left that organisation was they didn't like the way it was being run?

What if 'best fit' was based on a whole different set of criteria, such as 'having a different viewpoint' to the interviewer, or that the person who interviewed least well was potentially the best person for the job? This can happen, because often the person who is most keen on a position is the one who is most nervous and who, as a result, performs less well than someone who really couldn't care less if they got the job or not.

Arguably, one of the biggest interferences in the selection process is superificial appearances. Few people will admit to rejecting a candidate because he or she was too short, too fat, too 'foreign' in appearance, but it still happens, and far too often. If job interviewers had to 'blind interview' each candidate, so that they were unable to make assumptions based on presentation, would they be more successful? Obviously, because then they would have to focus on skills, strengths and the best fit of worker to the job. Add a voice distorter to hide accents and we are beginning to develop a recipe for success. And building a culture that welcomes people who might not look, dress, act and speak exactly the same as everyone else in the workplace will ensure that they fit most comfortably into the team. In a golbal, dynamic and unpredictable climate, giving the 'best fit' criteria a complete makeover is one step in the right direction for the bottom line and the future of an organisation.

Reinvent Your Career - For Adults Only

This month is a highlight in the career diary, the Reinvent Your Career Expo is on in Melbourne over the weekend of 11 and 12 July. My career practitioner colleagues and I will be providing free career health checks and resume checks. We will also be offering a smorgasbord of seminars on a range of career and job search issues. You can find out more about this on the Career Dimensions web page as well as at www.reinventyourcareer.com.au.

This expo is aimed at adult career changers and so I have been thinking about how adults manage the career change process. It is understandable that students often have trouble working out what to do with their lives; after all, everything is new to them and they don't have a lot of life experience to work with.

But an inability to make good career decisions, and to take appropriate actions, is not restricted to young people. From my experience working with people across the lifespan and in diverse industries, I think we have a long way to go before we can say we do this well. I count myself in this group, if I am being honest. I have often found career change to be a difficult process, fraught with complications and strong emotions.

I have had trouble leaving a job that I have been unhappy in. I have dithered and delayed moving on to something better due to what I have argued is loyalty when really it had more to do with fear of the unknown. I have cried myself to sleep at night wondering why I didn't seem to fit in, couldn't develop a particular skill or do a task as well as others around me, and have berated myself for being lazy and not putting in enough effort when really I was simply a square peg in a round hole.

Does this sound familiar? What is even stranger is that, despite my ability to help others dream about the perfect career and then take steps to make it happen, I still struggle with all these issues myself. So it appears that knowledge does not always equal power!

But there is good news. Career change can and should be a highly positive experience. If we can identify the real issues, rather than laying blame on a difficult boss or boring tasks, we can begin taking real steps to move on.

At each stage in life we have different needs, and recognising when our needs have changed, or when we are no longer challenged in a particular work environment, is the first step to reinventing our careers.

Why don't you give yourself the opportunity right now to work out what it is you need from your career, and then measure these against your current job role. Are you feeling stressed, unchallenged, or just plain bored? You probably need to move on. If this sounds like you, why not start with one small step? See a career counsellor! Reply now and find out how you can reinvent your career.

The poll we conducted in July 'Have you ever stayed in a job past its use by date' attracted 7 responses - 6 Yes and 1 No. On the basis of this poll (which admittedly isn't truly representative of the population at large), 85% of people have stayed too long in a job. Which is quite believable, based on my own anecdotal evidencesourced from direct contact with clients.

How important is a university degree when competing for jobs?

My career coaching work provides me with plenty of opportunities to meet highly talented people, across a wide range of industries and occupations. Most of the clients I see are dedicated and hard working with a fantastic array of skills that are in hot demand, demonstrated by their high incomes and excellent appraisals. Not one of the people I have seen over the past two years has taken their career for granted, using every opportunity to increase their employability along the way.

I can easily see that these people have been assets to their employers in the past, and are respected in their current workplace. They will have no trouble getting a new job when they are ready to move on in their career - or will they?

Well, they shouldn't. But something quite strange has happened over the past two to three years. Subtle developments in thinking have caused a mindshift about what makes a candidate worthwhile, with the result that a university qualification is now viewed as a baseline requirement. This phenomenon may have been instigated by recruiters, desperate to find a surefire shortlisting mechanism. It may well be driven by new leaders who have all emerged from tertiary studies and can't imagine why anyone would dare step out in the world of work without at least an honours degree. Perhaps companies are sensing that they need to gear up to meet global workforce expectations. Certainly the universities themselves, hungry to fill their places and obtain their government funding, are getting the message out that you are nobody without an alumni pin to call your own.

So where does this leave my wonderful clients, some of whom have TAFE diplomas, others have clocked up twenty or more years in the workplace, many of whom have mortgages, families and other general living expenses? They would love to be able to fit in time to study, but a university degree takes quite a lot of time and effort to achieve.

There have been moves to address this perceived inadequacy in our over-thirties workforce. Universities have begun offering postgraduate vocational qualifications to assist people with work experience to obtain higher degrees, and to eliminate the need to obtain a Bachelor's degree before doing so. However, those who have a Graduate Certificate in something wonderful are still being told that these qualifications don't count for an awful lot if there is no undergraduate degree behind it.

This worries me on a number of levels.The first relates to advising my clients. Do I tell them to drop their wage to that of a casual waitperson like those who are twenty years younger are doing? Is this even feasible? What may happen at the end of a three or four year degree? Will creeping credentialism attack again and place them in the position of needing a Masters qualification?

My second level of concern relates to the obvious repercussions on our society as a whole when we no longer value what people have to offer in the workplace. Apart from the obvious economic and social implications, and the demoralisation that goes with rejection upon rejection in the job application process, there is a lack of fundamental commonsense about what makes the world turn.

I have a number of university qualifications, including an arts degree, and I am happy to have these achievements behind me. But they don't make me better at what I do, they are just one form of learning that make up my work intelligence.

I wonder just how realistic it is to expect a person who works a 60 hour week to add a study program into the mix. What are the damaging effects of having overworked, overstressed, underconfident workers who feel that nothing they have done or can do will be good enough.

It is definitely time for a rethink. If society at large is going to insist that everyone needs a degree, then we need to make it possible for them to get one. If we decide it really isn't that important, we need to rethink the messages we are telling ourselves and others.

Do recruiters really do background searches on jobseekers?

On speaking to a range of recruiters in the Melbourne area during the period March to May 2009 I found quite a mix of responses to this question. It is generally accepted in the industry that recruiters have, wherever possible, performed background searches. Let's face it, they can't rely on candidates to tell the whole truth about themselves. In a majority of cases this is not a problem, and who would want to know every little detail anyway? However, the cost of hiring an employee is significant and recruiters have their own reputation to uphold.

Traditionally, background checks have involved consulting referees prior to forwarding a shortlist of suitable candidates on to a client. In addition, more informal approaches have been adopted as well, such as speaking to someone who knows someone etc., which was always easier in smaller communities and niche areas than for general roles in large cities. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are all easy-to-access social networking sites which make background searching easier. Others come and go as well, but at the present time these are the sites accessed most often.

So, we know they do it, but just how widespread is the practice? Unsurprisingly, the responses I received fell into always, never, and sometimes categories. Those who fell into the 'always' category tended to be involved in recruiting for professional and executive roles where the stakes are high - large salary packages are involved, high levels of responsibility and security access. This was particularly widespread in niche areas such as finance, IT and HR.

Graduate recruiters would not admit to undertaking background searches across the board, but most agreed that they often perform background searches in the final stages, and especially when they are trying to separate two or more excellent candidates. On-hirer firms also fit into the ‘sometimes’ category. Recruiters who sometimes performed background checks using social networking sites were those sourcing candidates for retail, hospitality and administration roles, while those in the 'never' category included short term filling and blue collar roles. The reason cited most often was a lack of time, urgency of placement and the belief that it didn't really help with their decision making process.

Interestingly, of those who said they always performed background searches, around half said this did not make the selection process easier. It seems that if you dig deep enough you will find the dirt on anyone. Working out exactly which dirt relates to employment suicide is another big issue, with responses as varied as those undertaking the searches.

Generally it was accepted by all recruiters that jobseekers should be cautious about what they show the world. Examples abound describing how successful candidates have had offers withdrawn after an unfortunate activity was recorded and/or applauded on Facebook. The recommendation is that, if you must use the web to document everything you do and are, keep that one private, for viewing by your friends only. Have another that is available publicly to present you in the best possible light.