QUESTION: Two of my children have settled into good jobs since university, but my son seems unable to find a job.
He was employed for a while doing work experience and everyone said he was brilliant. But although he's been offered a few jobs since, he won't take them, for various reasons. One was too far away, one needed him to work one weekend in four, another needed him to create a website, which he said he found too daunting - though he knows a lot about computers.
He's now been out of work for nine months. What can we do to help him find something suitable?
Yours sincerely, Dodie
ANSWER: The word that leaps out at me from your email is “suitable”. I'm amazed that you, or your son, are assuming for one moment that he's going to get a “suitable” job at this stage in his life.
What were your first jobs? Were they “suitable”? I worked for ages as a typist, cleaner and shop assistant when I was young - long before I got a job that involved any kind of writing. And that was during a period when jobs grew on trees.
What your son needs is a job, any job. The longer he stays out of work - and nine months is quite a long time - the greater this chasm of unemployment will appear to be on his CV.
“What were you doing,” the interviewers will ask, “just after university?”
When your son answers: “Nothing. I just applied for jobs and turned them down,” it won't look good.
What a lot of young people think is that if they accept a job that isn't “suitable”, they'll be stuck with it for ever. A lifetime appears to stretch out ahead of them, a life of a two-hour commute to work, or a weekend tied up every month, or being endlessly forced to do things they can't do - and fail dismally at them - till finally they're sacked in disgrace.
With the software and apps that are around on the web, frankly anyone can create a website these days. I was going to add “even me”, and then I dithered. But thinking about it, yes, if my life depended on it, even me. Creating a website isn't being asked to walk on a wire between the Twin Towers or thrust his head into the mouth of a lion. As any fool can drive, pretty much any fool can construct a website, particularly if they are under the age of 30.
And anyway, he should be working at something, even if it's unpaid. Charity work, unpaid intern - anything.
None of this advice will have any effect if it comes from one of you. If you can possibly get an older, successful male professional to tell him this, all the better. And tell him to butter your son up as well. He needs confidence. He needs to be told he's got huge potential. He's more likely to believe it. And he must remember that whatever anyone says, how he looks makes a huge impact.
Tell him that all this “they've got to take me as I am” stuff is rubbish. Clean hair, clean shoes and, if he's wearing a suit, not some ghastly shiny remnant from sixth form worn over a nylon shirt, but something new and smart, with an elegant tie or some other outfit that spells success and confidence in himself. You may have to fund the look, but it'll be worth it in the future.
The Independent