Foreign Perspectives

Archive for April, 2009

One of the biggest surprises that I had when I started the psychology course this year was the sheer number of separate tutorial groups that it has in the area. Previously with the language courses it was one group to cover the whole of Ireland whereas there are six or seven separate ones for this psychology course and it’s not even the most popular course (Exploring Psychology in case you were wondering).

That larger number of students is also reflected in the blogging world with myself prattling on here, Lynn doing something vaguely similar and Tim being very dedicated. And that’s just from the crop of students studying the course right now with Tanya and presumably others being around in previous years.

Where does all this interest come from though. Well, for me this is notionally the first course in a psychology degree being followed out of interest at the moment although I tend to use my qualifications eventually. The others in my tutor group pretty much all seem to be working with children in some connection so the current course is of more immediate benefit to them. That doesn’t explain why Exploring Psychology (which is considered the first OU psychology course) is running with around 8000 students but I guess that understanding how peoples’ minds work is an interesting topic for an awful lot of people.

One of the unfortunate side-effects of the recession is that there are both more people looking for jobs and fewer jobs to go around.

Sounds obvious but that combination means that each job on offer attracts a great deal more interest. Popular jobs can attract hundreds of applicants and even more specialised ones where you’d normally expect a handful of applications can attract far more applications than the employers are equipped to adequately deal with.

That massive scaling up of applications can clearly swamp the employers who end up being forced into reducing the numbers significantly to something more manageable. How they do that can often be quite counter productive as typically they will do things like increase the level of qualifications or experience above that required and asked for. Now, you might think that having more qualified staff would be a “good thing” but if the job really needs just a few GCSEs and you end up selecting someone with a masters degree (which happens), is that person really going to be considering the job as a viable option for them long term? One likely side-effect of this strategy is that once things do pick up many of those over qualified staff that you chose will leave.

Another equally random approach is to reduce the level of advertising of job vacancies. This is better than the “over qualified” approach but is difficult to achieve these days once a job vacancy appears on any website. The other problem is that by reducing the advertising you may miss the very person who is ideal for the job although were you hit with an unrealistic number of applicants you’ll likely miss that person anyway.

In the computer field one common tactic is to ask for a whole series of specific skills. On first sight, this appears to be better than the other approaches. However, if the list of skills is too long it’s possible to end up with no applications, even in the current climate, and this approach also has similar employee retention problems as the “over qualified” approach when the economy eventually picks up.

At the moment there doesn’t appear to be any fully workable solution and things can only get worse in the months to come as the number of jobs on offer reduces and the number of applicants continues to climb. Let’s just hope that things get onto a more even keel soon.