The summer may traditionally be the time of year when you find out which pub has the best beer garden or you experiment with how long you can stay in bed for, but I’m sorry to say all my student bed headed friends that you might have to abandon these traditional pursuits and turn your mind to making yourself more employable.  Research released by TMP Worldwide shows that 60% of graduating students in 2010 will not have any suitable work experience and that 78% will have spent the previous summer relaxing.  The summer is a time to relax, but it should also be a time to make yourself more employable for the future, especially in a time of such economic uncertainties as many of the reports we see passing through Here Comes The Boss Towers indicate that graduates are going to have an increasingly hard time in the recruitment market.  Thankfully this information is dribbling down and the National Council for Work Experience (NCWE) got out on to the streets to find out what you think, and the results were illuminating.  The NCWE survived 1500 students and graduated and found that 66% of them felt obliged to do some sort of unpaid internship due to the recession and to make themselves more employable and 67% felt they were being exploited by employers offering unpaid internships, but only 49% had actually done any of this unpaid work!  I spoke to my good friend Heather Collier, director of the NCWE to find out what she thought: “It’s worrying to hear that so many young people consider themselves as exploited and almost forced to work for free. Nobody should feel that to gain the employability skills they need to land a job, they have to work without pay for a significant length of time. These are difficult to times for everyone, but it’s not a green light for businesses to act unethically. If there is any doubt in an employer’s mind regarding potential exploitation, it’s simple – pay them!�

We said it yesterday and probably the day before that and the week before that and the month before that, but get yourself some work experience.  Get yourself an internship!  Even the government are catching onto our ideas and it’s a well known fact that they’re a bunch of f*** wits! Never missing the chance to provide a sound bite or two my good friend David Lammy The Minister for Skills (He has some mad beat boxing skills!) attended a conference organised by the East of England Development Agency and said that graduates could provide fresh talent for businesses: “The Talent Pool will sit alongside the thousands of other opportunities available to new graduates that will help them improve their chances to get a long-term and well paid career�.  If the government know it’s a good idea, then businesses will also know it’s a good idea so check out some of these videos on internships or our friends at RateMyPlacement or WEXO.

Good news internship hunters, during my many, many hours of web crawling (and no I still don’t know how those pictures ended up in my personal collection) I found something that should be of interest to you.  Over at The Big Yellow Self Storage Company they’re looking for a paid intern to help with the launch of their new highly classified campaign, but they doing it with a twist.  The self storers have decided to break the mould and take a leaf out of the speed dating book, and adding in a little social media to be in the safe side.  Yes they’re going to mix it up, spin you around and aim you at 12seconds.tv where they want you to load up a video of yourself saying why you’re the greatest.  For those of you unfamiliar with 12seconds.tv let old Boss Hanson educate you: it’s a video micro blogging site offering you 12 seconds to do your worst.

 

So if you’re interested in becoming a self storage media campaign intern person here’s how to enter a competition designed to test your social media prowess:

 

1. Register an account on 12seconds.tv/campaign/bigyellowselfstorage

2. Link your Twitter account to your 12 seconds account

3. Record your video 12 second video on a mobile phone, video camera or webcam and upload your video at 12seconds.tv/campaign/bigyellowselfstorage

4. Fill in the ‘submit my CV’ from and attach a recent copy of your CV

 

The search is open to PR, marketing and new media undergraduates and new graduates but is also open to submissions from anyone else who fancies a go providing they’re over the age of 18 and are eligible to work in the UK.  The closing date for entries is May 30^th 2009. The winner will be announced on June 15^th 2009.

A government programme offering green advice to business called Envirowise (who ever thought of that name should be shot - Ernie Wise?) has come up with some alarming statistics on waste in Uk offices. Up to 120bn sheets of paper are wasted annually on needless printing, couple to that to print costs and its costing firms an average of 4% of their turnover. I once met a girl from KPMG who (somewhat ironically) won a trip to the Brazilian rainforest for coming up with an initiative to curb the firm’s waste of paper. Wherever your heading, even on a placement or work experience, have a look at the company’s waste and see if you can suggest how to improve matters. Remember the 4% line people will listen and take notice of the idea, and more importantly you… I beg your pardon?…You’re very welcome.

2008 and nepotism is still the best way of landing your dream career it seems: The latest intern (one month) at the Weekend FT is one Princess Beatrice. The pink sheet paper’s Corporate Social Responsibility policy states that intern opportunities should go to young people from the local area (Southwark, London) so the hiring of 19 year-old Bea who lives anywhere and everywhere but SE1. But its not just her career that seems to be in ascendant: the blame for the appointment has been pointed at the fashion editor Vanessa Friedman who is described in the press as “aspirational.â€� Like they say, Its not what you know…er…which is bad news for this site! See Friedman’s Young Designer contest to get through on talent not your family tree.