Work experience haunts graduates
Congratulations and welcome to the corporate world my fellow graduates from various universities, who have just graduated. The journey was not easy, but you managed to sail through. Now that you are out of school, let me share with you a common vocabulary, which you will be hearing almost daily during your job searching-work experience.
My former collegemate, Ian Tumeo, once wrote on his Facebook page wondering what it really means by the term work experience. I found it very interesting because it is a question many job seekers try to regurgitate, but it seems there is no immediate answer available to satisfy this.
Vice-Chancellor for Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources (Luanar), Professor George Kanyama Phiri, told graduates during the November 16 2016 graduation held at the Bingu International Convention Centre (Bicc) not to look for jobs, but rather create some for themselves and others.
This is true, but not all will venture into entrepreneurship. I was once a job seeker and let me admit that job searching is not an easy task.
Every graduate thinks that they will get a good job just after graduation. For instance, after my graduation, I had the belief that I would make it easily, but it’s not what I thought.
Almost all of the vacancies which I came across, employers were looking for someone with two years and above working experience. Really, this in an insult to someone who has spent four years doing tertiary education and yet he is expected to posses work experience.
But why work experience? Should we say the curriculum is not enough to prepare one for work? Now should we be blaming those that developed the curriculum for our universities, both public and private?
The demand for work experience exposes that there is a gap between what universities are offering and what employers are looking for. For instance, I have heard a number of managers saying that graduates fail to perform according to their expectations; hence, they opt to retain even the lowly educated, but with experience and the long-serving employees. When it comes to recruitment, they are always skeptical on recruiting fresh graduates because it becomes a gamble.
So, what is work experience? I came across this definition which stated that work experience is part of education programme where students experience the world of work often for the first time. It involves placement of students with employers primarily to observe and learn. Work experience can be obtained through internships.
Internship is a pre-professional experience that provides an opportunity to gain knowledge and experience that relate to a particular industry whether accounting, banking or marketing, among others.
This being the case, students are not exposed to the real industrial life while in school. In some colleges, students are sent to do internship in various organisations. The attachment programs hardly exceed three months. Should we say that for the four years spent in college, this internship period is enough for one to get the necessary exposure? Perhaps no. Now is the right time for all stakeholders to restructure the attachments programmess so that they should meet the requirements of employees.
The corporate world should also make arrangements with various colleges to be taking a number of students into various departments just to train them. Even if it means training them on non-paid arrangements. What matters are the skills they will acquire during the training period.
Lastly, my advice to all students as well as a job seekers: A high Grade Point Average (GPA) looks good on paper, but networking and building friendships is what gets you a job.n
