What is happening to starting salaries in this country?!

[user8636283901]

My starting salary in 2009 - so mid-GFC - was £30,000.

That was 16 years ago! And in one of the worlds worst global recessions since the Great Depression of the '30s.

I was casually looking at starting salaries in similar fields to mine and it seems like they're barely moved, all the while the cost of living is miles ahead of where it was 16 years ago.

Why are wages so low in this country?! Why haven't they moved up?!

Yeah my uni friends who worked in finance and even engineering had very different salaries to me. I was on 28K in my late 20s while they were on 40K+

2 FT teachers couldn’t rent and save up to buy and mortgage the same house now.

I think very few people can buy the equivalent house at the same age their parents did without significant family help

poor native people having had far more children than they can support independently,

I'm not sure that true in recent years - people aren't having dc.

I stared working in a bookshop in 1983. I was paid £3500 a year, my rent in a shared house was £15 a week and the three of us sharing used to spend £15 a week on food.
It seems crazy now

I think there’s so many issues. Part of the problem is pushing so many into university. University should be for the intellectually elite. It should be there to grow people intellectually in an academic environment.

Old polytechnics were great at training people in technical areas.

We need this distinction back. We need to stop sending all and sundry off to higher education, landing them with thousands in un repayable debt for Micky Mouse degrees that are worthless.

The expectation should be most people leave school and get a job.

We need to look inwards and move away from the globalisation bollocks. We need to get everyone who can work into work - we have enough people to do the jobs, we need to ensure only the people who really can’t work are supported by the state -and “really can’t work” should have very strict criteria.. I’ve worked through ptsd, major injury, major illness. I know people who suffer persistent pain, mental illness can’t walk who all work. Near enough everyone can work, it’s just easier not to. Rather than spending money on welfare pay for buses go ship people off to farms to pick fruit etc

No one should be supported by the government coming into this country. If you can’t work they should be deported. Men of fighting age should be in their home countries fighting for change, just like men here have done for centuries. We shouldn’t be spending billions each year because other countries can’t get their act together. By taking the fighting age men we are effectively supporting those regimes. How will they change of people affected just leave?

We should be incentiving those more likely to have intelligent well brought up children to have them through better funded child care and career breaks with better protections.

We should be shaking up the education system to ensure the next generation have better attitudes to work and life.

Children shouldn’t be left in situations where they can’t be adequately supported to become good citizens. Failing parents need to be overridden by the state.

We waste so much time and effort on utter drivel. To make money you need to make something or be in the support network of making something. Half the businesses I see now have a complete word salad explaining what they do which usually amounts to having a good sales pitch and offering little in value.

We need to stop thinking technology is great, especially AI. It is often a cancer. We need to stop thinking change is always beneficial progress.

We need to go back to embracing different opinions, different thought processes, proper individuality rather than the pseudo individuality of having turquoise hair. we need to go back to being able to offend people as this is often a motivator for them to change or be resilient.

The nuclear family needs to be seen as the ideal, yes sometimes things don’t work out but it is economically and socially the most effective.

Because it wants unicorn for price of a rabbit

Part of the problem is pushing so many into university.

The flip side of this is companies need to stop asking for degrees...

• Master's (required)

For £22.4k pa.

A masters?!

We ask for a degree but in the past 5 ish years are finding graduates are not starting with basic literacy skills and require a lot of training to get them up to scratch.

Because it’s written by AI and people are becoming to lazy or stupid to sense check

Yes that's a good point actually.

@PenAndPapyrus

As a harbinger of things to come, has anyone else noticed how private equity backed law firms are now hiring chartered accountants as well as lawyers where those professionals are self employed but get to use the company brand and insurance to justify charging clients more?

That's just "tweaking" the long established method of over-charging clients in accountants and solicitors practices by appointing employees to be "associate partners", i.e. so they can be charged out at "partner" rates, but in reality, they're not equity partners/owners, they're just normal staff, paid "normal" wages. Very common to give an employee a 10% wage rise to "appoint" them as an associate partner and then double their charge out rate!

Same in lots of other industries/businesses, where employees are given the title of "director", such as sales director, IT director, marketing director, etc., to give a completely different impression, making it look to customers/suppliers etc that such people were "directors" of the company, when in reality they weren't members of the Board of Directors.

Using sub contractors and self employed is just a more modern development of that kind of deceit. Starting in earnest about 25 years ago when the flood gates were opened for freelancers/self employed etc to set up their own personal service companies, aka disguised/fake self employment!

Perhaps go back to recruiting school leavers then rather than unnecessarily demanding a degree as a minimum entry qualification. It's firms who do that who are causing a lot of problems in the country, effectively forcing kids to go to university who don't need to nor want to go, just because they know that lazy employers are using a degree as a "weeding out" tool.

YES! Employers need to stop lazily using a degree as the weeding out tool by insisting on it as minimum entry requirement.

Politicians haven't learned from Brexit.
I don't know how many angry votes evetyone needs to see that things are not ok.
I am just waiting for some another advisory referendum to fuck things up while evetyone ooohs and aaaahhhs about why would possibly people vote angrily......

I suppose it depends on location and field but I would say that was an unusually high starting salary for the time. I graduated same year as you (good academic degree from northern redbrick, non-vocational field) and I don't know anyone who got 30k. Think that might be distorting the perception a bit here. 21-24 far more usual. (In fact a lot of us were on much less because of graduating into a recession and ending up in retail, care work or similar but that's a separate point maybe.)

Well it used to work very well because grads would come out with sufficient skills to get going and progress very quickly which doesn’t seem to be happening now.

We also take on school leavers and train them up but that takes a long time.

Ah, this was problem even before widespread AI. I apways said it's because the reasonable part inside of them is fighting the stupid part😂

Part of the reason is idiotic maths skills. People are dumb enough to think that if they just complain about people being rich on 70k in today's money will somehow improve things at the bottom of the ladder.

Yep you see it on here all the time.

It’s part of the culture here in the UK though, I feel people are ok with the filthy rich and wealthy but they’d rather bring down the middle earners they see as living it large on 100K, rather than have everyone’s salary pushed up so we are all earning significantly more at our respective levels

Blame the government for pushing more people to get a university education and devaluing having a degree as a result. For general admin roles someone who went straight into work from school and has built up skills in the workplace is probably a better bet for an employer than someone with a non- vocational degree now.

I started training to be an accountant straight from school and was fully qualified with practising certificate, at a younger age than my peers who'd spent 3 years at Uni and still had professional exams to take.

Subsequently, I recruited and trained young staff in a couple of firms I worked for (small accountancy practices). Our in house training was identical whether you were a school leaver with A levels (we didn't take on those without A levels) or a degree entrant. There was literally no difference in the type of work each group were given at each year of their training period. The only difference was degree entrants were exempted from some professional exams, (more if it was an accountancy degree), so the graduates could get through the exams quicker, but still couldn't "fully" qualify until they'd had the requisite number of years of practical experience, which as I say, was identical whether you were a school leaver or a graduate.

I can't honestly say there was any significant difference in the abilities/work of one group compared to another. Like I say, the work given to each group was identical, no differentiation at all. Some school leavers were better/worse than others, some graduates were better/worse than others. But on the whole, graduates were not noticeably better than school leavers, but remember we are talking A level school leavers, not 16 year olds.

Yup, we're really "into" the race to the bottom in this country, whether it's wages, healthcare, education. All that matters is equality, and if that means everyone is equally worse off, the lefties are happy!

I’m wouldn’t blame this solely on lefties though. Plenty of right wing leaning people have this attitude. It just shows up in different ways.

I started my first job after uni at about £14k, it was min wage and the best I could get.

I didn't hit £20+ until nearly 2012 when I turned 30, I remember because I felt like I'd made it.

I'm now on a good wage of £50k but there's no opportunity in the NW for me to increase that, I also hate my job but there's no opportunity for me to move into a new role with a new company at that level. Which is upsetting.