Pessimistic View Young People Have About Their Financial Prospects on 3AW 693 AM Radio Melbourne with Tom Elliott

Topic: Pessimistic view more than half of young people have about their financial prospects

Date: 17 October 2023

Media Outlet: 3AW 693AM Melbourne https://www.3aw.com.au

Broadcaster / Interviewer: Tom Elliott

Radio Summary:
https://www.3aw.com.au/the-pessimistic-view-more-than-half-of-young-people-have-about-their-financial-prospects

Duration: 00:07:14

Time of show: 16:10

Audio Recording:

YouTube Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVwS01kk8xI

Transcript

But look I want to go back to this um this survey I’ve come across from Monash Uni that says that young people are rather despondent about their financial future 53% of young Australians say they’ll be financially worse off than their parents 56% say that the only job they can get is in the gig economy I think you know Uber Eats or something like that and 85% of young Australians say they experience regular feelings of worry anxiety and pessimism about the future our next guest is a career development expert Sue Ellson good afternoon

Hi Tom

Well is it is it that hard to get a job at the moment I mean the the unemployment rate is still extraordinarily low like it’s still below 4% everybody says they’re screaming out to get good people to work for them is it that hard for young people to get jobs or get the sort of jobs they want

Well it really depends on their job search skills and how prepared they are for it and I’ve done work with a few Independent Schools and give them LinkedIn training and I’ve heard of a number of students who are studying who are picking up graduate internships before they’ve even completed their degree so if you have those job search skills you’ll definitely be able to do it but what tends to happen from what I’m seeing is people get these gig jobs and they’re worried that if they don’t do that work then they might lose it and they’re looking at multiple streams of income and all of a sudden they just find themselves on this merry go around that they can’t get off and and they sort of forget about those big dreams of of getting something better and and getting something more regular too

Yeah but I I mean you know I I came of age if you like in the jobs market I finished studying in there and I’m finished in 1992 and we’re in the middle of a terrible recession and um you know here in Victoria the unemployment rate was 10% but the youth unemployment rate was was almost 20% it was about 18 and a half like it really was tough to get any sort of job back then let alone you know some sort of glittering career but I remember that most of us were happy just to get any sort of job to pay the bills

Well yes and the biggest difference between then and now is we’ve now got social media and social media suggests to you oh if you just do this this and this you’ll make loads of money and so back in 1992 you might have heard about multi-level marketing schemes and been approached by individuals but now if these young people are on their phones they’re being told oh that you can make loads of money this way and that could be stopping them from you know taking that action and just getting the job and there’s also a number of extra safety nets out there so you know maybe they’re using those as well and sharing and doing that kind of thing to save money but the other thing that I think is also missing is that financial literacy piece because how many of them really know how to manage their money how many of them it’s not the avocado on toast it might be the you know delivered food or something like that that’s eating away at their incomes as well

That’s yeah like the number of them that get Uber Eats you know at least one meal a day which costs a fortune but they just think oh well it’s you know you only live once and it’s my life and I’ll do it um another thing I’ve noticed with younger people is they expect to be taken you know very seriously and their views treated with the utmost respect as though they’ve had years and years or decades of experience when they haven’t they a lot of them at a young age don’t seem to realize how little they actually know

Yes and I guess there’s a belief because you can look up everything supposedly on Google then they have access to that information so they don’t realize that well people existed without Google before and they didn’t have all that access to information so we actually had to learn those skills so particularly for people coming out of university first of all they went to secondary school and were told that you have to go to uni to get a job and then when they’re at uni they’re told you have to finish uni so you can get a job and but then they don’t necessarily pick up experience in the industry and some universities are full of teachers and lecturers that are academics trying to encourage them to continue on in the research path and they don’t have any skills out there in the industry so the chances of getting them from uni into and getting that work experience in the related field whilst they’re studying and also with the idea of what can be expected in the real world that’s missing as well and many years ago when I was involved in graduate recruitment we used to say it would take at least six months to get somebody who had just come out of uni into any form of reliable employee because it just took that long to sort of deprogram them from their university studies

So you got to you got to not knock all the stupid stuff out of their head that they’ve learned at university and and teach them the important things in in the real life workplace

Yeah and the university’s argument is oh but we’re teaching them the theory and you know that’s not the vocation but if you get lecturers who are actually part-time university lecturers and part-time in the workplace then the chances of them going from the discipline in which they were educated into that particular industry is much much higher so yeah that that counts as well

What one final question I’ve always wondered whether the universities actually um look at what is the job market for some of the courses that they’re teaching so you know working as I do in the media we get lots and lots of young graduates who do you know degrees in journalism and whatever and they they don’t a lot of them don’t seem to grasp that they are just aren’t the jobs in journalism that they used to be you know the newspapers don’t employ so many people they’re not profitable free to air TV is shrinking even radio we don’t have nearly the number of employees that we used to and I just wonder does anybody university tell them by the way this career is not necessarily such a great one in terms of job prospects

Well it would probably depend on the university and how closely they are connected to the industry so I know somebody like RMIT University is very closely connected to journalism and the Melbourne Press Club and all of that so they would be definitely on it I also spoke to a lawyer who said there were 3,000 law graduates a year and only 300 law graduate positions available per year so you know there’s definitely those gaps so I think that if you are considering a form of study you should understand the industry and know what the opportunities are and you should also be preparing for that before your final exams not after your final exams so you need to be planning that segue through to make sure that you can get into the industry and you know and you’ve made connections and you’ve spoken to people and you’ve got a mentor and you’ve joined the professional association and you’ve been a student member of the professional body all of those things will give you a much better chance of going into those areas

Thank you for your time Sue Ellson there Career Development Expert

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PESSIMISTIC YOUNG PEOPLE // Research from the Monash University Centre for Youth Policy and Education Practice (CYPEP) in their 2022 Australian Youth Barometer Report found 85 per cent of young people surveyed are anxious about navigating career pathways. Tom Elliott and I discussed this on Fairfax Media 3AW 693AM Radio Melbourne.

We discussed:

the value of job search skills
being prepared for work with a good quality LinkedIn Profile
gig jobs and multiple streams of income merry-go-round
social media and its influence on money making ideas
extra safety nets available
financial literacy – how many young people have these skills
not avocado on toast but now spending on delivered meals
belief that access to information is not the same as learning skills
secondary school advised to go to university to get a job
university advised to finish so you can get a job
university academics encourage research career
six months for university graduates to become a reliable employee
university focuses on theory not vocation
value of university lecturers working part time and lecturing part time
more likely to have students move into the industry if lecturers are in the industry
career job prospect matching with university and industry
RMIT University and Melbourne Press Club connected to journalism students and industry
planning during your studies, make connections, have a mentor, joined a professional association