Thread 52 - Covid GCSE Cohort - Autumn 24 - Start of Uni Yr 3

[Oblomov24]

2024 Autumn, start of year 3 for those at Uni.

This is a support thread for our young adults post GCSEs 2020, regardless of their educational setting, and their results ( or life updates for those who went into work or have had results earlier). It is respectfully requested that all are supportive and helpful to each other. If you want to start a debate, e.g state vs private, uni vs employment please don't within this thread.

Some of us have been here since first thread back in yr10, some will be new. Everyone has been friendly and helpful in the past. Everyone is welcome. It is hoped this will continue. We were previously on the secondary board and then further education, now we shall be here in 'Parents of Adult Children' gulp.

Our DS/DD may continue down various pathways ( employment, apprenticeships, higher ed). Experience is that everyone is welcomed wherever, whatever their child is doing we have some in work, gap years , apprenticeships etc too. Lots of contributors with different experiences and always sympathy and advice to be had.

51 Previous thread - 51.

@NCTDN DS had COVID for his 18th so I bought him some bottles of Corona (and an iPhone which he subsequently lost on a bus in Nottingham) Any ideas for his 21st over Christmas would be welcomed.

if he doesn’t want a thing, how about a memory? Would he like an air ticket and some money for travel? Doesn’t have to be a lot, ds1 is taking ds2 to Istanbul for his 21st and they’ve got a £50 flight and are staying in hostels. Or gig tickets? Or something he wants to do like a flying or glider lesson?

@NCTDN we got DS a watch but grandparents got him a leather satchel laptop bag he uses a lot at uni for going to lectures etc. I can't remember the brand but it is a lovely bag. It was about £180 i think. I have a feeling some Scottish brand. We got it from shop in town but am sure will be online too if he likes anything like that

I have to admit we failed to get anything special for our two's 18ths, I remember asking on here both times and there were lots of helpful suggestions but absolutely nothing either of them would have wanted, they didn't want parties of any description either. So I thought we'd wait for 21sts to go special and we are nearly there and still nothing. Parenting fail. Neither wears jewellery or watches (apart from DD liking beads), both prefer cheap backpacks to any sort of proper bag, they aren't into any sort of clothes or shoe brands or similar. So presents tend to end up being tech which isn't special in a long term way.

We bought national trust life membership for DD - a bit niche but like others, she isn't really into jewellery or any sort of "stuff"!

I have wondered about that @handmademitlove , I bought DS an adult membership when he turned 18 and have been renewing it but haven't for DD (the NT somehow knew when it was DS's 18th and wrote to tell me he could no longer use our family one but didn't with DD). DS would probably prefer RHS membership, DD I'm not sure, she'll still come with us to NT etc but not sure if she'd use it herself.

We loved Austria when we visited last year @NCTDN - Salzburg and a quick hop over to Berchtesgaden in Germany but we'd love to explore the other way and visit Vienna another time. Where is your DD?

Fantastic news @24newernames Congratulations to DS and roll on Dec 1st.

Has DD home all week for her reading week and she's v close to finishing her 1st assignment essay of the half term. Has had a head cold all week so it's been great she's been home so I can cook her healthy meals and fuss her a bit.

For DD’s 18th we put together with my parents to get her a car. Fir Ds we bought him a high end keyboard.

for her 21st she wanted money towards a trip to Holland. Goodness knows what we will get Ds. He’s showing no signs of being near passing his driving test.

How about an 'experience' day, like car racing - Formula 1. Is he into that sort of thing? F1000 Single Seater Thrill - 12 Laps | Trackdays.co.uk

Congratulations @24newernames that’s really good news!

I have noticed that where I live it is very hard to get a job and I wondered if this is a country wide issue or just where we are. My friend’s daughter is taking a year out after Alevels and was hoping to get a job in Tescos but it’s too competitive. She hasn’t got any experience and is finding it difficult to get her first job. She also applied to be a Christmas elf but needed experience working with children.

I am now worried about my younger daughter. She does tutoring but she’s not got experience dealing with customers or talking to other people.

@BlueMarigold I know, I keep reading news articles saying there is a chronic shortage of staff in hospitality and yet it seems so hard for teenagers to find work in these fields. A friend told me this week her DD had been for an interview at Waitrose and been told they had had 500 applicants for one job. It took my DD all summer to find part time work to do alongside college this year even though she had a year working in a pub behind her, she has finally found a weekend job at a garden centre. All I can advise is to keep looking everywhere you can and put word out amongst friends and family too, ask them to look for posters in windows etc. My DS got customer service experience volunteering in the local town museum during 6th form, so he learned about tills, card machines, talking to people etc. I am nervous about them both trying to find full time jobs next year.

Thank you all 😊

Our Local Facebook pages are full of people desperate for work, any work. I was concerned that DS’s temporary job may suddenly end and he’d be unemployed and unable to find anything. It just was luck that his new job was hiring again at this time as they don’t hire often and that for many reasons he was a far better candidate this time around. It is a big relief.

I think graduates probably need to be very flexible on location if they want a job that interests them. And they need to expect to apply for loads of positions before being offered. With DS he said something about being clever, I said yes you are but there are lots of clever people around. Thankfully that prompted him to make the most of his temporary job and ask to work in different areas to widen his skill base and experience so that he had something to show for his time there.

As for teenagers trying to get retail/ hospitality jobs I think a lot is about keeping your ear to the ground about where friends work, who might be hiring etc especially with smaller businesses. That said, McDonalds was good for DS1 and they were very flexible but I have heard of people being turned down recently so who knows what is going on.

There’s definitely lots of competition for jobs, especially in cities. Dd must have applied for over a hundred jobs in Nottingham before she got the caring one. Ds got his job in Tesco through a friend’s mum who worked there. I think youngsters have to expect to put in lots of applications, whether it’s for temp work or a grad position.

It was so different for us. I got a job every summer via Pertemps, no problem and I only applied for one graduate job which I got! I then went for 2 jobs at a big firm a few years later and got one of them. I moved after 18 years to UoB, which was the only job I applied for! I think I’ve had four interviews my whole life 🤣

Reading the comments about young people looking for work here coupled with the young people i know and their struggles to find work, i think this generation, the Gen Z's as they're called, are collateral damage in the tech wave that swept during Covid that has completely changed the way work happens. Remote working for one has opened up the floodgates for employers to cast their nets wider. This is not a bad thing but it's made competition fiercer. I think there is a learning gap that needs to be filled to support youngsters over the threshold from school to work in the form of advice on careers previously unthought of, working patterns, hrs of work etc because all these have changed. Most are just hobbling along, looking at post-Covid work through the lens of pre Covid work and getting increasingly frustrated. I really feel there needs to be a focus on this group of youngsters by providing specialist careers advice that goes beyond just school.

@Shimy I think that’s true for office jobs but this person wanted to work in Tesco as a cashier or shelf stacker to earn some money before starting uni. They got good grades and are in the process of applying to some very competitive unis. They are worried that they have no job yet so in the PS there is nothing to say how they are planning to spend their gap year. No work experience as they were focusing on exams.

It's really tough for kids today, and for new graduates. Hang on in there!

Ideally DD would have found a paid term-time job, and she did apply for loads without success, but we're happy that she is volunteering regularly in the sector where she might end up working. She'll be able to put it on her CV and get some glowing references. (She's in charge of decorating the museum's many, many, street-facing windows for Christmas, which ticks both the 'museum work' and 'commissioned illustrations' boxes.)

She is looking forward to the summer; her art-school has a big stand at a "new talent" trade-fair. This is where most UK publishers and agents look for their next generation of artists. It's a very different world to other lines of work.

I agree that careers advice from professionals and (even more so) from parents is stuck in the pre-Covid models.

Here is a pic of her decorating the museum windows for Hallowe'en!

@crazycrofter In the three different periods of my life, in very different cities, where I needed short-term work I just signed up with temp agencies and was given jobs pretty much instantly. In two of those I was the only bloke doing secretarial work (I can type very quickly which was rare back then) which led to a few little culture-clash moments. Different world.

@BlueMarigold Sorry if this is obvious but as more people shop online these days i'd imagine more retail vacancies are now online positions so have they looked for online retail work in addition to in person work?

Just to add, DS's customer service work before uni all came from voluntary work as they couldn't get the supermarket jobs either, yes they are quite competitive! they both worked for various local charities including the library. DS2 in particular did a lot of work in our local library and they were both able to write good PS's incorporating their experience there into demonstrating their interpersonal skill.

Re jobs - ds is 17 and applied for so many that I've lost count. He only wants about 12 hours a week. Most he's never even heard back from. He had an interview at McDonalds that was 1.5 hours long and then told him he wasn't available for the hours they wanted!! You'd have thought it was a management post he was going for He has just got a job today in a coffee shop, simply because I was in there yesterday and know a member of staff. I asked and was told he could go in and try it. It makes a joke of applying for hundreds on Indeed. It's all to do with who you know.
DD got a lot of work though through a hospitality company called Arc. That was really good because she could choose which shifts she wanted to sign up for. The pay was above minimum wage as well. DS has signed up but they don't seem to offer and work if under 18.

@Shimy I didn’t think of that so it wasn’t that obvious to me! Ofcourse it makes sense now that you’ve said that. I didn’t think about online shopping.

Yes DD1 had a lot of experience before starting uni too. Mostly from volunteering.

I guess I didn’t appreciate how hard things are for young people these days.

@BlueMarigold The replacement of retail staff with self manned tills has also played a big part in reducing the number of positions available. This is what I meant by saying there needs to be more targeted advice for young people the genZs from 16 upwards because they are still looking for the type of work that we did and things have changed a lot. What & where are the types of jobs that sharpen/develop one's interpersonal skills but are no longer in shops? (just a rhetoric question).

@Shimy Probably in call centres! Although even those are under threat from voice-recognition/AI replacements. 😟

DS has finally got some part time work in a pub. Never done bar work before, only coffee shop, but the manager spoke to him on the phone and then asked him to come in for a chat. DS was upfront about still looking for a graduate job, but was still offered it. Manager said 56 people had applied!!
Ds was really down when he didn't even get interviews for 2 jobs in the chain he had previously worked for doing the same job!

@PhotoDad I think of call centers as places you call to get your PC fixed, that's how old I'm feeling right now. I can't think of any call center that's a household name. It's all really fuzzy to me how the whole chain now works.

@Seeline Sorry to about the job problems with your ds, I'm surprised they didn't give him the job that he'd already been doing, that feels very unfair.

@Seeline Just re read your post and you said, 'didn't get interviews'. Still feels unfair but judging by what your other DS said 56 for the pub job its all a bit cray at the moment in the job market. All he can do is not give up ad keep trying, the right job is out there for him.