Any Other Business

11 July 2009

When the solemn temples are dissolving, why are they still offering giant salaries?

I had the pleasure of giving a prize-giving speech on Saturday, at a lovely school called Fyling Hall which looks out over the North Sea near Whitby. I have developed a theme which seems to go down well on these occasions: treasure your long-term friendships, I advise the leavers, because the people with whom you walk life’s path will turn out to be far more reliable than the institutions along the way, which look so permanent but turn out not to be: cue quote from The Tempest about gorgeous palaces and solemn temples dissolving. By way of illustration, I tell them that my own 15-year City career literally left not a rack behind: not only have all the companies I worked for ceased to exist, but every City building I ever worked in has been obliterated. The last to go was Ebbgate House, an early-Eighties horror beside the Thames west of London Bridge; I let out a spontaneous yodel of joy in a taxi the other day when I realised it had been reduced to dust.

Essential to my theory of impermanence is the realisation that things change for the better as well as for the worse, but that they always change. I hope that’s a comfort to the debt-laden generation now leaving university and contemplating a graduate job market in which there are an average of 48 applicants for every place. The Association of Graduate Recruiters says vacancies are down this year by a quarter, and that employers forecast scant improvement in 2010.

The AGR report also reveals a couple of cruel ironies. The first is that the students who have bothered to acquire the kind of technical skills on which the future of our economy depends, in computer sciences and engineering, are among the least likely to find employment this year. The second is that anyone who finds a job in an investment bank or fund management firm can still expect a starting salary of £36,000 — which is about 40 per cent higher than UK average earnings, and tells us what the City really thinks of the idea that moderating its own pay-scales might help create a future in which the solemn temples don’t dissolve quite so often.

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