Venetia Thompson and Rory Sutherland say that the era in which all graduates want to work in the financial sector is at a close: a splendid time to rebrand inactivity as ‘travel’
University careers fairs have always been a complete waste of time. In the old days students came away armed with nothing more than ABN-Amro highlighters and miniature alarm clocks (probably now collectable), some unusable minute RBS Post-it notes, and perhaps the odd snow-shaker. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and their cohorts quickly ran out of all paraphernalia — but no matter because everyone wanted to be a banker anyway. Even hapless blondes who hadn’t studied maths, economics, business or anything vaguely related, still wanted to be in banking (trust us, we have inside information on this one). They were from a generation which had grown up thinking that careers were simply divided into law and finance.
Even students who had never balanced an equation, barely passed maths GCSE, never read the FT and had no clue what a bond was could still end up ensconced on a trading floor: because that was the sort of place the City was throughout the 1990s and early Noughties — joyously up for grabs to even the most mathematically challenged.
But the City is no longer a world that everyone with a vague desire to make money can stumble into and embark on a career. More to the point: they don’t want to. The City is suddenly as out of fashion as it was three decades ago.
In the 1970s almost all glamorous jobs (spy, astronaut, detective, test-pilot, Concorde engineer, nuclear scientist, doctor, New Avenger, Jason King) seemed to be in the public sector — at least judging by what you saw on television. The single role for the private sector in Seventies TV drama was villains, something which applied even to American-made programmes.
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