supperware.net » writings » how to succeed in the real world

The sun is shining. Women are disrobing. Exams are drawing to a close. Most of the people who are reading this newspaper won’t be here next year. Some will never set foot in Guildford again. Since this is the last barefacts before September, the time is ripe to discuss the future.

If the University’s employment statistics are honest, I can assume that the vast majority of people who graduate this year will walk straight into a proper job. I have a suspicion, though, that our enviable employment figures are caused not so much by the ‘strong industrial ties’ of which we are so proud as they are by the fact that hardly anybody here is studying an Arts subject. I can’t help thinking that any University which categorises Law and French as Arts subjects is sweeping something unsavoury under the carpet.

For this reason, I am concentrating on employment opportunities for Arts graduates. This doesn’t mean that the article won’t be useful if you study a more lucrative subject. However, according to a number of recent stories in this newspaper, Arts graduates are underdogs in the job market, and the careers service isn’t very well equipped to deal with them either. This brings me to the huge difficulties Arts graduates seem to have finding employment. From my experience, there are only five types of job available: performing (for the lucky ones: the pay is good only because the hours are relentless), teaching, administrating for a charity, becoming a Union sabbatical, or flipping hamburgers.

It’s a general rule in life that if you have flair, intelligence, ambition, imagination, and skill, but few English or Science qualifications to your name, you’re not going to withstand the scrutiny of any self-respecting personnel department. This is because anybody who has spent several years in a personnel department will still be there because they suffocated many of those qualities themselves.

Only large, successful companies can justify having dedicated personnel departments. Now, it is a general rule that these large, successful companies are ruthlessly efficient: otherwise they’d be medium-sized, unsuccessful companies. Every day, a clerk in a personnel department of such a company will have to recruit other people who are more talented than he or she is. Meanwhile, he or she will sort CVs in the same office while people all around are being promoted to other departments with better pay. Vetting CVs for a living is not a pleasant job. If you have attributes that enable you to escape from such a job, you will use them. Hence, only the least ambitious or able people will be around to read your job application. How are they going to recognise qualities in you that their employer constantly reminds them that they lack?

This explains why anybody who is applying for a graduate job with the word ‘music’ or ‘dance’ or ‘art’ anywhere in their degree title is usually put on the pile marked ‘We will keep your CV on file. We will review it again as soon as Sir Cliff Richard announces he’s the First Horseman of the Apocalypse’.

The trick is to apply only to medium-sized, unsuccessful companies, who don’t have proper recruitment procedures owing to the petty empire-building culture imposed by their stifling and wasteful middle management structures. Schools, hospitals, and government departments are just some public institutions that operate this venerated British hierarchy. The chances are that you’ll be offered an interview simply because the CVs have been skimmed at the last minute and filtered in a very arbitrary way, for example by excluding all Pisceans and anyone who has listed football as a hobby. You will then be lied to, and told that nobody has bothered to read the CV that you spent six hours compiling because ‘everybody lies in their CVs’.

If you are offered a job, such a company will either go down the pan two years later, or worse, be taken over by Americans. If you escape the streamlining that follows, they will waste your time with pointless productivity workshops, self-assessment questionnaires, and training programmes. These will all prove so costly to the company that they will no longer be able to afford your wages. Then you’ll get the sack.

On the other hand, if you are lucky enough to have experienced the wonder of an industrial placement, a potentially useful plan is to seek permanent employment with the same company. However, many of the people I know who found good placements in their third year discovered that they were unsuited to the field in which they worked. Actually, this is a diplomatic way of putting it. The post-presentation talks often ran like this: ‘This would be a valuable placement for anybody wishing to be paid subsistence wages to perform work that any moron could do. Anybody wishing to learn how to be given no responsibility and simultaneously to accept all blame when anything goes wrong, work psyche-splitting hours with not even a murmur of thanks, and live off beans on toast in a damp cupboard while small children throw stones at it and nick anything of value, may find this to be an excellent experience. Any questions?’

There is, of course, another alternative: make some successful friends and learn from them. I’ve been watching my fellow graduates for a few years now, so it’s obvious which ones have amounted to something. I reckon that it’s quite easy to tell at an early stage who is going to earn all the money. For example, you can analyse somebody fairly well by the company they keep. This ‘company’ needn’t be just friends and colleagues — it also refers to other engaging uses of social time, such as books, CDs, or films.

You can spot profitable talent fairly easily. It’s all just a game of ‘Monkey See, Monkey Do’. For example, I have three or four friends whose bookshelves include a number of self-motivational books. They all earn a lot of money. These self-motivational books invariably have hirsute, grinning men on the front cover underneath embossed bold capitals. They’re all called things like ‘Say No To Negativity’, ‘Shag, Blag And Blackmail Your Way To A Seven-Figure Salary’, ‘Actually, You Can Take it With You When You Die’, and ‘Self Hypnotism: How To Poo Solid Platinum Jewellery’.

These books use convoluted psychological techniques to inform people of the blindingly obvious. Anybody who displays this kind of book in their homes is consciously advocating it. They are doing so because they can spot two things in the book: themselves, and the person they want to become.

Self-motivational books do seem to work. They assist clever, industrious people to even higher levels of attainment. This is because making money entails doing two things. First, learn to believe in your own approach. This is called confidence. Second, if you’re going to tell people the blindingly obvious, don’t do it without making it sound clever. This is called consultancy, and it’s worth at least fifty pounds an hour.

There’s no magic to it, just two principal rules: always accompany bullshit with flattery, and never say anything for free if people will pay to hear it. If you want to earn four hundred pounds a day, it’s got to be worth a shot. You don’t even have to be a bastard. Here’s a related tactic: steal ideas from books and CDs by rich and successful people. Then produce some yourself. This takes a lot of luck and tenacity, but it’s not impossible. So Solid Crew have done it, and they’re clearly idiots.

If these ruses fail and you still can’t find a permanent job, there are a few other avenues to explore. For example, you could persuade your father to join a golf club or the Freemasons, and then to use his influence to get you a job. You could pretend to be an Old Etonian — but remember that this will only work if you’re a man. I don’t know if any of these techniques are sound, but it’s worth a try, and it’s something that careers advisers never seem to mention. Perhaps that’s because they’re all golfers and Freemasons themselves.

Finally, there’s one important option that I haven’t yet mentioned. To be honest, it’s because I’ve dug myself a bit of a hole. If I was born to succeed, I wouldn’t have bottled out of the real world, packed in a pretty decent job after less than eighteen months, and returned to University. But it’s certainly an option. If all goes well, I will be graduating next year with a PhD from the Institute of Sound Recording — or whatever the School of Arts decides to call it that week.

Exactly how many fries will you be wanting with that?

Published in barefacts 1058 • 15 May 2003