Monday, April 16, 2007
In the shadow of greatness
Mrs. Moneypenny (mrsmoneypenny@ft.com)
Monday, April 6, 2007, FT
The City of London is the ultimate bastion of communism. That was the view expressed by Anthony Hilton, veteran financial commentator, at a breakfast I attended the other day. The reason? Workers, rather than the owners of capital, command the biggest share of the profits. He was referring to the gargantuan bonuses distributed across the investment banking industry in the Square Mile, but it could equally apply to Wall Street. In what other industry do shareholders patiently stand by, accepting scraps from the table, while profits are looted by the staff?
No wonder competition to secure a job in investment banking is so intense. It’s not enough to be graduating from Oxford or Cambridge with a first class degree and to speak four languages. I am told by several banks that one of the ways they whittle down thousands of applicants to the 200-300 that they interview each year is by looking for relevant work experience, or internships.
Proper internships are paid (or unpaid) temporary positions in companies, taken up by young people still in education. These are best done in large companies that can spare the time and resources needed to invest in the intern and which intend to benefit from a decent length of service from them. There is no tradition of internships in the UK. Instead, by the time I left university I had had several jobs, starting at 15 washing up in a pub. One summer was spent at Gatwick airport in a bright red uniform ushering drunken passengers on to charter planes, but it is hard to see how that prepared me for a career in capital markets. Equally, working in a ski resort taught me how to feed 20 people on ₤10 a day, but that was not a skill that I needed in the City.
In the US and continental Europe, by contrast, the tradition of the intern is well established. Students apply to competitive schemes and spend their summer holidays working to improve their job prospects. Many of them will do several internships. Young people in the Netherlands and Germany in particular seem to be in danger of becoming grandparents before they get an undergraduate degree as they procrastinate through endless internships.
In the UK, we have our own way of doing things. The term ”work experience” is one I dread hearing. Work experience is when someone asks to foist their 16-year-old child on to you for a week or two so that he or she can get an idea of their career options. Some schools even make it part of their syllabus. Last summer my company agreed to take on two such young people, for the usual appalling reason that their parents were well known to us and therefore had undue influence. This took up a massive amount of time, not least because their schools sent inspectors to check out our offices and our adherence to health and safety rules.
The girls themselves were delightful, but that isn’t the point. Would we have taken them on were they not the children of people we knew? Of course not. The exercise took up valuable resources with no obvious gain to our business other than two sets of hugely grateful parents. And of course, this system isn’t limited to school-age children. We are also often asked to create holiday jobs for undergraduates and even ”starter” jobs for graduates, many of whom seem, to my horror, not to know what they want to do in life.
I must admit that I too use this system. Cost Centre #1 is 17 and will be applying to university this year. His CV will list several work experience stints at various big companies. But I wish there were a different way to help our children start their careers.
As a reasonably solvent parent, I would even be prepared to pay to get CC#1 the relevant work experience he needs. I know that there will be those up in arms about this idea, that it would favour the rich over the poor. But how is it different from his experience so far? I have paid for his education, so why not pay for work experience too? If you are going to give a child an advantage, why not go all the way? Surely that is better than begging favours?
I have decided to start a company that exists purely to deliver work experience to undecided graduates. I plan to staff it with new graduates who need both career advice and a starter job. We will limit their contracts to three months, long enough to get something sensible on to their CV and to be able to give them a reference. And we will charge their parents for taking them on. Capitalism at its worst? Yes. But it is only an extension of what goes on already. And who knows, a few of our ”interns” might even make it into the Square Mile, where they too can embrace communism by looting shareholder returns by way of bonuses. They will earn enough to send their children to private school - and so begins the cycle all over again. ¶ 2:35 AM
Monday, April 6, 2007, FT
The City of London is the ultimate bastion of communism. That was the view expressed by Anthony Hilton, veteran financial commentator, at a breakfast I attended the other day. The reason? Workers, rather than the owners of capital, command the biggest share of the profits. He was referring to the gargantuan bonuses distributed across the investment banking industry in the Square Mile, but it could equally apply to Wall Street. In what other industry do shareholders patiently stand by, accepting scraps from the table, while profits are looted by the staff?
No wonder competition to secure a job in investment banking is so intense. It’s not enough to be graduating from Oxford or Cambridge with a first class degree and to speak four languages. I am told by several banks that one of the ways they whittle down thousands of applicants to the 200-300 that they interview each year is by looking for relevant work experience, or internships.
Proper internships are paid (or unpaid) temporary positions in companies, taken up by young people still in education. These are best done in large companies that can spare the time and resources needed to invest in the intern and which intend to benefit from a decent length of service from them. There is no tradition of internships in the UK. Instead, by the time I left university I had had several jobs, starting at 15 washing up in a pub. One summer was spent at Gatwick airport in a bright red uniform ushering drunken passengers on to charter planes, but it is hard to see how that prepared me for a career in capital markets. Equally, working in a ski resort taught me how to feed 20 people on ₤10 a day, but that was not a skill that I needed in the City.
In the US and continental Europe, by contrast, the tradition of the intern is well established. Students apply to competitive schemes and spend their summer holidays working to improve their job prospects. Many of them will do several internships. Young people in the Netherlands and Germany in particular seem to be in danger of becoming grandparents before they get an undergraduate degree as they procrastinate through endless internships.
In the UK, we have our own way of doing things. The term ”work experience” is one I dread hearing. Work experience is when someone asks to foist their 16-year-old child on to you for a week or two so that he or she can get an idea of their career options. Some schools even make it part of their syllabus. Last summer my company agreed to take on two such young people, for the usual appalling reason that their parents were well known to us and therefore had undue influence. This took up a massive amount of time, not least because their schools sent inspectors to check out our offices and our adherence to health and safety rules.
The girls themselves were delightful, but that isn’t the point. Would we have taken them on were they not the children of people we knew? Of course not. The exercise took up valuable resources with no obvious gain to our business other than two sets of hugely grateful parents. And of course, this system isn’t limited to school-age children. We are also often asked to create holiday jobs for undergraduates and even ”starter” jobs for graduates, many of whom seem, to my horror, not to know what they want to do in life.
I must admit that I too use this system. Cost Centre #1 is 17 and will be applying to university this year. His CV will list several work experience stints at various big companies. But I wish there were a different way to help our children start their careers.
As a reasonably solvent parent, I would even be prepared to pay to get CC#1 the relevant work experience he needs. I know that there will be those up in arms about this idea, that it would favour the rich over the poor. But how is it different from his experience so far? I have paid for his education, so why not pay for work experience too? If you are going to give a child an advantage, why not go all the way? Surely that is better than begging favours?
I have decided to start a company that exists purely to deliver work experience to undecided graduates. I plan to staff it with new graduates who need both career advice and a starter job. We will limit their contracts to three months, long enough to get something sensible on to their CV and to be able to give them a reference. And we will charge their parents for taking them on. Capitalism at its worst? Yes. But it is only an extension of what goes on already. And who knows, a few of our ”interns” might even make it into the Square Mile, where they too can embrace communism by looting shareholder returns by way of bonuses. They will earn enough to send their children to private school - and so begins the cycle all over again. ¶ 2:35 AM
