Bursting bubbles: Graduates' askewed job expectations

Career service and guidance is becoming a big emphasis for many tertiary schools in Singapore. In fact if you take a look at Gebiz (Singapore government procurement portal), many schools at the secondary level have already done their fair share of career workshops in one form or another.

This is very much in line with the ECG initiative by the Ministry of Education. ECG stands for Education and Career Guidance and helps students make decisions based on their interests, abilities, and passion, while considering current and future career opportunities. The students are also encouraged to learn more about the world of work across different industries, and take positive steps to achieve their aspirations.

The rationale is to bridge the gap between graduates' readiness to enter the workforce and the various demands expected by the employers in the market. So hopefully this will manage expectations better on both ends and create happier employees and employers, which in turn would lead to a more productive partnership.

I'm all for the concept.

Graduates account for about 25% of the thousands of job seekers I had spoken with. And as time goes by, their level of job expectations grows from laborious to ridiculous. I have done career coaching for a group of MBA students. They have never worked a single day in their life and yet every single one of them appears to have memorised from the same script – every one of them wants to be a manager when they step into the workforce.

In their mind, MBA is an instant level up to go from rookie to experience. Unfortunately for them, employers don't have a copy of the same rule book. And this is just one group of them. There are the degree graduates that expect 15% more than the average listed in last year's graduate employment survey. The 15% comes from a 5% inflation adjustment and "I’m at least 10% better than the average”.

Before them there were also the polytechnics and the ITE graduates. Although most of them will attempt to get a degree by hook or by crook, a small percentage will come out into the workforce and jump from job to job as they already learned all they can in 9 months. If only the same speed of learning was applied to school time, they could have gotten their diploma at 12 years old.

So ECG is supposed to step in to address the inaccurate expectations, fantasies, and dreams graduates now tend to have about jobs from one too many employer branding advertisements.

However graduates seemingly aren't aware that qualification is pretty much given. An engineer who graduated from Temasek Polytechnic can diagnose and fix the generator no quicker than the one who graduated from Singapore Polytechnic. Schools teach us to be the same.

It is your talent that will make you different, and this can either be genetic (lucky you) or you have to work at it. As Malcolm Gladwell stated in his book Outliers, it takes 100 hours to master a skill but 10,000 hours to make you a master.

So this also means you have to be hardworking, not exactly the kind of vocabulary that many younger generations are accustomed to. With the uber-isation of everything from taxis to cleaning to even essay writing, the hardest work is to select the elance vendor to go with.

But without that, you can't master anything and employers won't pay above average just because you have one more distinction than the classmate next to you. They won't be showcasing your grades alongside their income statement during earnings call.

And finally you can be the most talented person with thousands of hours of practice but if you behave obnoxiously, luck isn't going to come your way. And luck has been proven to be one of the main success factors, according to Richard Branson.

He believes that "luck" is one of the most misunderstood and underappreciated factors in life.

You can't control the weather or the stock market, but you certainly can control opportunities by building a vast network. But to do so, you need to have high EQ or emotional quotient. In essence, humbleness. To be aware that there are many things in life you need to learn and even if you are good, there is always someone else who is better.

Or else you may become like the guy who who wrote in a newspaper forum defending the greatness of Elitism and why Raffles Institution should continue to be the bedrock of intelligent people who will be groomed to become lawyers and doctors.

No one will want to hang around with a guy like that, let alone pass him any opportunities.