Recent figures show that the number of positions available to graduates has dropped by nearly 4% compared to the same time last year.
And ultimately, what these findings from the Association of Graduate Recruiters demonstrate is that little has changed since the recession some five years ago. Some sectors are showing so-called “green shoots”, including utility companies and IT, but they merely plug the gap left by industries that have not recovered from the blow, such as banking.
Property firms have, in recent years, scaled back their graduate intakes. However, there is evidence the number of positions are creeping up again and certainly, economically, there are brighter days on the horizon.
But in the meantime, fortune favours those who keep their options open and fortunately, a property degree offers highly transferable skills, so all is not lost if you don’t immediately get a job.
Greg Horton, an adviser with the National Careers Service, says: “Turning your thoughts to these transferable skills will provide you with new insights into your capabilities. Aside from surveying, jobs such as town planning, management consultancy and even further education lecturing become within your reach.”
However, Horton accepts it can be difficult to know where to start when looking for work. But try not to be overwhelmed, every task is achievable,” he says.
Achievable indeed and here are three success stories for inspiration.
Supermarket sweep
Andrew Coles’ early career ambitions and working life lay in TV production, but he now works as the national acquisitions manager for the Co-operative Group. While he may not be working from within property’s magic circle of firms, he is applying his real estate vocation in the cut-and-thrust world of food retail.
It was the lure of Yorkshire’s rolling hills, where there was a lack of TV jobs, that prompted Coles, 51, to turn to surveying. He worked as an estate agent in Otley while studying chartered surveying. But after graduating in the late 1980s, through the College of Estate Management, the economic conditions made it difficult to get a job.
“I remember cold calling more than 200 firms at the time nationwide,” he says.
So Coles, originally from Harrogate, answered an advertisement for a regional property manager with Asda in Leeds and got the job.
“I was a very fresh chartered surveyor, but at 30 years old, maturity obviously counted for something,” he says. “What I had learned at uni was to talk to people. Networking is a vital skill and being able to communicate easily with a variety of people is very important. The property world is very small, so you need to be able to get along.”
Coles spent 15 years at Asda, including a two-year stint in Germany with its parent company, Walmart. He was headhunted for his current role three years ago, and admits his career trajectory was more accident than design.
“Opportunity played a big part in the moves. In hindsight, I would not have stayed at Asda for so long,” he says.
Dining out on experience
Rosie Hallam graduated as a chartered surveyor from Nottingham Trent University in 2008 “into one of the worst jobs markets in history”. Twenty-one years old at the time, she decided to take a working holiday in Australia, hopeful that by the time she returned the recession would have blown over. It didn’t.
Still unable to secure a property job, despite working in Sydney with Colliers International as the corporate real estate administrator of their new Bank of Western Australia ATM portfolio, Hallam, 26, took another direction. She got a front-of-house role at the Gaucho restaurant in Richmond, found it was “more fun than I could ever have imagined”, then went on to an assistant manager role at Gaucho’s Charlotte Street branch. However, the job was relentless: “From the moment you walk in the door at 10am you don’t stop and you may work for anything up to a 15-hour shift,” she says.
Hallam, originally from Derbyshire, quit without a job to go to and pursued a property career that also called on her experience in leisure.
Though she insists her surveying degree had served her well, she adds: “I’m a great believer that no experience is ever wasted. From leading a team to learning how to market a property, it has all been useful in the restaurant world.”
Hallam is now a graduate surveyor at Fleurets, a property company that specialises in licensed and leisure properties. She spends her days inspecting restaurants, pubs, bars and nightclubs, combining her love of restaurants with her academic ability and expertise in property.
“I’ve been involved in projects from rent reviews of pubs to marketing a piece of land related to Henley Royal Regatta and inspecting a vineyard,” she says.
Hallam’s career path to surveying was hardly traditional, but even if she could turn back time she says she “still wouldn’t have changed a thing.”
The long and short of it
For someone with a thing for men’s undergarments, property was an unusual pursuit. But even with his sights fixed firmly on manufacturing boxer shorts, Henry Hales could still recognise the transferable skills a property degree could offer, such as law and investments.
The shorts idea had been brewing in Hales’ head from the age of 16. Even then he noticed it was an untapped market, and wrote to Richard Branson to invite him to invest in a manufacturing business.
“I told him in return I would call them Virgin boxers,” says Hales, now 24. Eight years later, he is still waiting for a reply.
Hales, from Warwickshire, never gave up, but in 2007 he shelved his ambitions to explore his education options. “I wasn’t an academic, so thought I should study something vocational and the property course had many aspects; I knew I’d learn a good cross-section of skills,” he says.
Hales studied a BSc in real estate management at Oxford Brookes and graduated in 2010 with a First. He felt he had earned credibility. Going back to his business idea, he researched the value in manufacturing boxer shorts and was delighted to learn there was still a gap in the market. With his team work and management skills sharpened at university, in 2011 Hales set up Sir Plus, scouring tailors and factories for excess fabric to make upcycled boxer shorts to sell at Spitalfields and Portobello markets as well as online. His range has expanded into waistcoats and knitwear. Hales believes his success was in no small part down to what he learned at university.
“Property is a business and therefore there are lots of aspects of the course that are applicable to other industries,” he says.
Yep, even making boxer shorts. who’d have thought?
