The job situation: don't be another brick in the wall

A woman technician at STRATA, a composite aerostructures manufacturing plant in Al Ain. Jumana El Heloueh / Reuters

Last month, I wrote a feature about bridging the gender gap in the Emirati work force. Emirati women are increasingly branching out into a wider range of specialised, technical fields, such as engineering, breaking the mould and in many cases, surpassing beyond their male counter-parts. However, many are struggling.

In truth, it’s not just women - and it’s not just Emiratis - but individuals’ employability depends on their individual circumstances. In the context of Emirati women - the reasons they struggle vary from cultural, logistical and economic circumstances to not meeting the requirments of the job market. One woman in particular - 25-year-old human resources graduate, Alyazia Albufalah - reminded me how difficult it can be to get that first job post-2008 financial meltdown.

Alyazia spent a year-and-a-half applying to jobs to no avail. Employers either promised her belated jobs that never materialised, or flat out said she didn’t have enough experience. None, she said, offered her an opportunity to gain unpaid work experience. Zack Abdi, a frequent speaker on Emiratisation and sustainability, said people who studied non-technical subjects, like human resources, did not match the skill requirements of the UAE job market.

Human resources is a very specific subject, though it is not a specialised one - the knowledge cannot be applied to a wide range of fields. The same could be said of my business and management undergraduate degree. While I did learn some hard skills, like management accounting, most of the course was a concoction of pseudo-intellectual theories and vague ‘skills’.

I failed one module gratuitously titled ‘team challenges’, which claimed to bolster teamwork. It was my first univeristy seminar ever; I turned up, they put us in teams and showed us the syllabus. This week we would be making tents out of newspapers. In groups. And then we’d write about it. Next week it was a lego situation. Repeat. I remember thinking how unceremoniously misleading the title ‘team challenges’ was; it does not take much delegation to build a tent out newspapers, nor is it much of a challenge for anyone physically capable of stacking light objects. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I opted out; stopped attending and took basic modules in history and music instead.

The only economics module we did was ‘an introduction to economics’ . Introduction is a generous term. Perhaps "a prelude to economics" would be more appropriate. The entire syllabus was contained in the Wikipedia entry for ‘economics’. The same was true of marketing, and the other core business fields you’d expect a ‘business and management’ degree to cover in-depth. Instead, we learned about ‘organisational behaviour’, ‘key business competences’, ‘self-awareness’ and other bizarre, mash-up modules that never really taught us anything concrete about anything specific.

I never really wanted to go into business. In fact, hearing the term ‘profit maximisation’ 20 times a day was soul-crushing. As was the ‘business ethics’ module. Corporations, I contended, aren’t there to be ethical, they’re there to make money. Their ultimate duty to their stakeholders is a financial one. That’s not my perogative, that's just the way capitalism has turned out. Blame Adam Smith for his lack of foresight. Or Reagan. Or the boogie. Being my charming, facetious self; my dissertation hypothesised that it was more profitable for businesses to be unethical. So, I recommended businesses either disregard ethics if they can get away with it, or pretend to be an ethical brand, without actually being an ethical brand. The irony was lost on my supervisor.

The day I graduated, I looked at all the self-styled entrepreneurs graduating with me; thousands of them. And then I considered how many other business graduates there would be across the UK that year alone, and then the world. And some of the other business schools actually taught their students how to do business. It didn't look good. Disappointing display on Dragons' Den, here I come. Ironically, two people from my high school got jobs at Big Four companies sooner than anyone from my business school - and these gentlemen studied Chinese and philosophy, respectively.

“Cool story bro. But why,” you ask, “did you study business in the first place if you had no intention of going into management?” Well, I knew what I enjoyed; music, philosophy, literature. However, every person I, an inexperienced teenager, spoke to said I’d never get a job if I studied those subjects. I would fail and cry and eat too much chocolate ice cream and get fat and descend into a spiral of shame-eating, agoraphobia and disrepair. “It’s nice to have a hobby.” Perhaps I should have spoken to artists. I thought I could work on my passions and work some corporate day job until I was successful enough to support myself off my true calling. And if I never did succeed, at least I’ll have something to fall back on.

It wasn’t until I finished slogging through that degree that I realised studying business didn’t help at all - and even if it did, I didn’t have to have an unfulfilling day job. Nobody had ever really told me that before; it was always “nobody likes their job, that’s the way the world works, grow up, deal with it”. Then I did a three-month internship at a radio station. I understood the trade-off: work for free and put down three months of work experience on my CV. And it was rewarding. Eventually I was doing the job of a full-time broadcast journalist: writing, reporting, narrating, producing and editing my own audio packages. But my heart was in print.

Over the next 12 months, I trained at Sheffield University, simultaneously doing a masters degree and becoming an NCTJ accredited reporter. Of course I struggled to find work, I had to do another month-and-a-half of work for free, I had to fend off the corporate sharks trying to exploit me, but I knew it would be worth it. And I found an amazing job in a more reasonable amount of time than I would have without the purely practical skills and experience I had gained.

A close friend of mine, who works in the film industry, lives by the maxim: follow your passion, and you’ll never work a day in your life. And after moving into journalism, I can confidently say he’s right. Of course it can be difficult and frustrating, but the satisfaction of taking the high road, not compromising my dreams, and those moments of success – it can’t be matched. And to actually be doing a dream job; not many people can say they do the same.

I also recently met Oliver Acker, who runs the Cartoon Network Animation Academy. He said the exact same thing of animation. It can be infuriating  and incredibly challenging, but animators do what they love for a living. Tarek Monzer, a former advertising executive and one of Oliver's current students, said throwing away a lucrative career in advertising so he could train to do what he loves was "liberating".

[caption id="attachment_27409" align="alignright" width="640"]

Liberated: Tarek Monzer studies during a class at the Cartoon Network Animation Academy in Abu Dhabi. Ravindranath K / The National[/caption]

So many people are struggling to find work; even after taking ‘practical’ degrees over interesting ones. Specialising in a field shows an individual is capable of acquiring practical skills and vocational cohesion, whether it be engineering or creative writing. But reciting dictated theory demonstrates someone capable of doing that and that alone. There’s no critical thinking involved, something that is often lacking in education. My high school discouraged critical thinking; aside from a few passionate literature and history teachers, it was very strongly discouraged. I was conscious of it at the time, as were my artistic friends, and we resented it. I didn’t want to be another brick in the wall, and could never understand why a teacher would want that for their students. It doesn’t lead to a fulfilling life, which I’ve always wanted for myself, and it doesn’t lead to a job either.

Teenagers are not encouraged to think about prospective careers until the last minute - and then they have to rush into applying to misguided degrees. Teachers tell them what to apply for instead of asking, and don’t give them the opportunity to make informed decisions for themselves. Work experience and internships should be reserved for high school students. Post-2008, we’re still all delaying it until after university. On one level, it means kids have no idea what they’re getting themselves into when they apply to a university degree, which is an enormous commitment of time and money. And on another, it means that even after graduating, they have to play catch-up for employers who increasingly demand people have at least six months of free work experience. When you’ve got a student loan, bills and rent to pay, that’s an enormous problem. If young people must pay their dues, its better to pay them sooner, rather than later.

On top of that, there’s a strong paradigm in schools that passions should be suppressed, and kept as hobbies. In high school, I was always given the impression I would never excel at anything, that I should aim to just settle and get by. I think everybody shared that experience. Well, everybody except the rugby team. It’s a huge problem. Children should be told they can achieve anything they put their minds to – that life is about living, not breathing, and that following their passions is the key to success and excellence – not memorising loaded words and building tents out of newspaper.