According to a recent article in The Times, "graduates who take stop-gap jobs after leaving university can get so depressed by the boredom of their work that they... would be better off staying on the dole. After nine months of low-grade work, graduates were more distressed, less motivated and more likely to fall into depression than those who were unemployed".
The research was conducted by Tony Cassidy, of the University of Ulster, and Liz Wright, of De Montfort University, and was presented at the British Psychological Society conference in Dublin on the 4th April.
2 comments:
interesting findings but the usual question arises of what is causing what. the stop gap job may be making the person depressed or the person's depression is fuelling their inability or unwillingness to get in to the full swing of their career.
Your point is very valid - statistics are easily biased when we don't understand cause and effect.
Or more to the point this article makes the common error of lumping all graduates into one category. Breaking down the statistics into disciplines there's a lot of different situations e.g. I started in finance after a gap on my CV, I was expected to do that as the mantra is "the more you work outside finance the more you forget" (often ignored in the career advice world run by HR muppets). On the depression angle I was low but VERY motivated as I knew quickly that I would get a position as I was in the know - that's another thing not really picked out - are people just 1950s style scattergun applying and putting their heads in their hands or are people actually getting the industry low-down like I did? Generally speaking if it's hard to get a grad job employers will be sympathetic and if it's easy they'll query gaps (again HR morons will probably ignore the first part but good companies will use this new fangled thing called their brain). It also depends on how in touch they are.
On the other hand a friend who is a successful project manager took a stopgap job before entering and describes getting into project management as being done "in spite of having no time to apply" - to his mind there are several graduates he worked with at the same call centre he worked at, and this is 6 years on. It's hard to say what causes what but he reckons some just didn't have the confidence for their profession and probably were still in shock from not having a job lined up before uni finished (I mean he'd preplanned it as he was very aware of the situation and what he needed to get into project management), others just seemed to be uninformed or at least imbecilic in their approach. Very complex situation really.
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