Round Peg / Square Job - Career Guidance for English Graduates

You might think that you chances of getting the job are lower than the chances of Jon Prescott squeezing through the ticket barriers at Westminster tube but this does not have to be the case. How do you knock your square peg through their round hole? You need adapt and persuade them to adapt with you. Non-vocational degrees make interviews that little bit more difficult. As non-vocational graduates, we need to gain additional 'job specific' skills before embarking on our desired career paths and because of this we can find ourselves in an unusual position - battling for a job that is a means to an end. When careers advisors, tutors and graduates start to prepare for this circuitous route to fulfilling employment the first step will surely be to develop our talent for hammering square pegs into round holes.

You are sat in a job interview. You have got an MA in Critical Theory and the subject of your undergraduate dissertation was Batman. Your potential employer seeks someone with experience of Microsoft Excel and handling inbound telephone enquiries. I've been sat in that interview twice and my catastrophic failure the first time forced me to beef up my efforts the second time.

Why did I fail so miserably the first time?

Ideologically speaking I occupied the same space both interviews: However, I am using 'I' in the abstract, poetic "What makes me who I am?" kind of a way. This is fine if you're at university but hopeless if you're pitching yourself in a thirty-minute interview to a panel of people who have already seen ten others struggle to articulate their vague notions of who they are and why they want the job. I failed because I was unwilling to adapt to the needs of my interviewers and so they were unwilling to accommodate me.

When I say that I was the same both times, I mean that my personal beliefs did not alter in the time between the two interviews. I did not want to enter the private sector and accumalating personal wealth was not the key factor in my choice of career. At some point in the future I wanted to take up teaching, but after five years at university I felt that it was important to take a break from academia. My hope was to obtain a job in the public sector, in a role that would allow me to exercise my burgeoning social conscience. I also wanted to start work early, finish early, and enjoy my free time. This narrowed my field of potential employers to public sector organisations involved in education with progressive management styles. I applied for the post of project manager for school based training at a prestigious University in the East Midlands.

This would have provided a perfect run into my eventual career of choice and built my experience working in Higher Education but fatally, I went into the interview 'cold' with only my burning ideology to keep me warm. "They [the interviewers] should want me for who I am, it shouldn't matter how I dress or how much preparation I've done." Idealistically keen that they make their decision on how they found me that day, I felt sure that they would respond well to my honest presentation.

In the grand scheme of stupid assumptions this rates pretty highly as the dumbest interview technique ever. If you don't doggedly prepare for an interview then in the thirty minutes that the panel have to talk to you all learn is that you are ill prepared. I sabotaged my chances of success. I clearly did not want the job that I had applied for, I wanted the jobs several levels above it. I refused to acknowledge that having a postgraduate degree might not entitle me to walk straight into my job of choice. A little over a year after my first, catastrophic interview, I obtained an interview for a role in a government agency concerned with increasing standards in education. This time, I worked up to and around the interview, temping in a number of public sector areas. I was aware of Public Sector infrastructure problems and made it clear to the panel that I had a proven track record in solving these.

What does Critical Theory make you? It makes you analytical and intellectually creative. I demonstrated how I had used a wide variety of logic and IT systems to overcome operational difficulties in previous jobs. I did not want to problem solve IT issues for the rest of my life but demonstrating this on a relatively low level at your point of entry puts you on a path to progression through to a management level within an organisation. I made an academic strength into a tangible commodity. The application form for the post demanded the demonstration of competencies by examples from prior experience. I learnt my responses on the application form 'off by heart' and then learnt alternate responses not on the form for use in the interview. I then learnt these off by heart too. This sounds like basic advice. It is basic. Prepare. Then prepare. And then prepare some more. You will challenge your thinking and develop your argument, becoming coherent, committed, focussed and articulate in your response. This preparation meant that I was calm and focussed before the interview. When it was over I felt confident enough to ask a series of challenging question to the panel. So well done me!

We've had quite a journey together haven't we? I've indulged in your time and attention and you've shared in the fall and rise of a minor civil servant. You had fun and I was bloody brilliant! Just kidding. The initial realisation that your feminist criticism of 'Pride and Prejudice' is a skill not directly transferable to the workplace is hard. Hell, we've all been there. However, this is not to say that it is does not have some level of transferability. I'm working proof that you can make a comprehensive knowledge of '-ism's' an attractive commodity!