You graduated, now what?

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It's university graduation season at the moment, so well done to all those people who worked really hard and passed their exams. I recently read a heart-warming story about a young guy from UKZN who took his grandmother along with him to his graduation. When they called him up to the stage, he took her with him and put the gown on her and got them to actually cap her.

Read: UKZN student honours great-grandmother at graduation

For this young man, it was all about acknowledging her role in getting him that far and he said he couldn’t have done it without her. His parents had died when he was very young and she raised him and put him through varsity.

There was also another story of two brothers and a sister, all of whom graduated with their masters in education; all three of them at the same time, and they are a testament to people who go to university and work hard and take their tertiary education really seriously.

The fact is, universities are usually in the news because students are protesting for some legitimate and sometimes non-legitimate reason and despite all that, it is graduation season and it’s the culmination and celebration of the hard work of those who do pass despite the odds. The thing is: tertiary education is expensive and parents fork out a lot of money to get their children educated, so it’s heartening to see those that make it through.

Anyone who has ever been to university and has graduated knows the feeling that you get when you put on that cap and gown and that degree is conferred on you. It’s a culmination of slog and parents, in some cases, having to work two jobs to pay for their children to get to that point.

And what does that piece of paper mean? It’s supposed to open up work opportunities and a better life for that person. But it’s not just about that piece of paper; it’s about you as an individual. It’s not just about meeting the requirements of the degree. You’ve got to be somebody that’s going to get yourself out there. You listen to some of these kids that come out of university and think “that’s it, now I’m sorted”, but if you throw them into a working environment, they still have so much more to learn.

They don’t know the basics of how to function in a working environment, like being on time, being disciplined, meeting deadlines, getting things done, being meticulous, not making mistakes – these are the things every employer wants out of their employees. This is not automatic with that certificate.

When you graduate, you have some content knowledge; you have some idea of how things may work. Let’s say you’ve done an accounting degree, so you know how the numbers work or how things should be organised, or some legislation around financial law, but it’s more than that. You have got to look at it as a holistic thing.

So my advice to these graduates would be: get your LinkedIn profile really sorted and market yourself and get involved; go and find an internship somewhere and learn things about the industry in which you want to get involved. A lot of young graduates say, “I am not going to do this or that because I have a degree”, but that’s rubbish. You need to do anything to get your foot in the door and demonstrate the value proposition you bring to a business; how do you make a contribution?

And yes, it might not necessarily be in the field that you studied, but you have to start somewhere, you have to demonstrate your value. For example, I’ve been working in television now for twenty-six years and I remember being asked to give a talk at the graduation ceremony of the journalism and TV production students a while back. I discovered that everyone just wanted to be a star, and they couldn’t get their heads around the fact that this will not happen for most.

If you look at the credit roll on any movie or TV production, you would come across about a hundred and fifty names on there, but there might be an on-screen cast of about ten or twelve people; five main people and a handful of extras. The rest of the people are behind the scenes production crew getting things done and making it happen. So just because you have that certificate doesn’t mean you’re automatically going to be in the limelight.

There needs to be a hunger to learn the most about your industry and perhaps after years of slog and paying your dues, you might earn a place in the spotlight, but you need to work at it and towards it. It’s not just going to fall into your lap.

The world is changing, and so you might have trained for one thing but you should be open to any opportunity; develop an open-opportunity mindset. And so if something comes along which may seem like something you could really get into and you have to learn how to do, you have to have a mindset that says, “I can learn new things”. You need to get yourself a set of skills that enable you to do just that. If it means you go online and spend hours watching YouTube clips on how to do things you have studied towards, then do that. You have got to put in the time and be prepared to learn new skills. Don’t sit there and think, “I’ve spent five years at university and I now have a comprehensive and complete set of skills that I don’t need to touch.” You have to constantly aspire to learn.

When I entered the industry, for example, there was no such thing as social media. I had to learn that as I went along. So as it became something that was relevant to my industry, I learnt about it. And what I did was: I made sure that I learned everything. I was not just content to be in front of a camera. I learned how to produce, direct, write scripts, shoot, and even the admin side of my business like working out and balancing budgets and so on. I therefore made myself indispensable on any production on which we worked. And I can now walk into any production and do the same, because I know how to do every single job on a TV show, and I know how to do it well. But graduates these days are not willing to pay those dues.

So, when you graduate and you’re sitting without a job, you need to ask yourself why. And you can’t say to yourself, “There are no jobs out there – even for a graduate!” There are jobs out there; you just need to be willing to do whatever it takes. The fact is, companies are always looking for people that can add value to their business.

You can email Terence Pillay at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter: @terencepillay1 and tweet him your thoughts.