BBC Lab UK - About The Get Yourself Hired Test

Thinking about your SKILLS

Professor Rachel Mulvey from the University of East London is the brains behind the skills section of the Get Yourself Hired Test. Here’s what she had to say.

Imagine for a moment that you’re not the jobseeker, but the employer. Taking on a new worker is a big deal for you. It's going to cost you time and money. Time, because somebody from your workforce needs to select the new employee, hire them, show them exactly what needs to be done and then keep an eye on them constantly until they know enough to do the job themselves. Money because they may have to pay to advertise the job and of course, time is money when you’re in business!

So when you are looking for work, particularly if you are finding it hard to get the kind of job you want, it can help to look at things from the employer’s point of view. Once you know what the employer wants, you can do your best to make sure you offer exactly that. There are some attitudes and behaviours that EVERY employer wants, things like honesty, loyalty, reliability and punctuality. Developing and demonstrating these will always help you on your jobseeking journey. For some jobs, the employer requires you to have a specific set of skills and training. That’s no different to what we all want as customers or patients. We expect a surgeon or a hairdresser to know what they are doing when they whip out our appendix or cut our hair! And it’s fairly easy for an employer to check that an applicant has the relevant qualifications for these jobs.

Some skills are just as desirable if you want to be a hairdresser as if you want to be a surgeon.

Skills that everyone wants!

But in addition to specific skills that a job might require, there is a whole set of identical skills that crop up time and time again in totally different jobs and in totally different places. These are skills that might be equally desirable in surgeons, hairdressers, call centre staff or construction workers. If you can develop these skills, you’re surely putting yourself in a strong position for finding work.

So what are these skills? They’re things like working in a team, solving problems, being prepared to take responsibility, keeping going when things get tough, taking care of customers, being able to manage a project, numeracy and literacy. You will develop these skills when you are doing a job, but you can also develop them through voluntary and unpaid work. They're sometimes called ‘soft’ skills but that doesn’t mean they aren’t important. Once you have developed one of these skills, it sticks with you and you can take it with you to every job you ever do – for this reason, they are called ‘transferable skills’.

We want to know how well-developed people think their transferable skills are. It doesn’t matter if you find yours are in need of some development. At least you will know what you need to work on. And by taking part in the study you’ll also be helping us discover how much confidence people have in their own skills.

How do you think about TIME?

Professor Ed Cairns and colleagues Professor Gary Adams and Shelley McKeown from the University of Ulster are interested to find out about time perspectives. They explain why below.

We want to investigate something called ‘time perspectives’ among young people in the UK to understand why we don’t always learn from the past or understand our own behaviour in the future. This part of the test is based on work done by Professor Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University in the USA. He has done research which shows the importance of what he calls our ‘time perspective’. He believes that while we might not realise it, the way we think about time plays a big role in the way we think about our personal experiences. In turn, this influences how we make decisions as well as other aspects of our lives like our mental health.

In this experiment, for the first time ever, we’re collecting data about the time perspectives of young people across the UK. We’re especially interested in how this impacts people’s job seeking behaviours. We also hope to explore the suggestions that our time perspectives are influenced by the cultures in which we grow up, so we’ll be looking for variations in time perspectives across different ethnicities and geographically across the country.

This STAGE OF YOUR LIFE

Professor Leo Hendry from the University of Aberdeen and Professor Marion Kloep from the University of Glamorgan engineered the section about your stage of life. Here they explain what they’re interested to find out.

Changes in our society mean the journey to adulthood is very different to the way it used to be. These changes have been economic, environmental, social and cultural and they present new and different challenges to young people growing up in modern Britain. Traditional developmental tasks such as gaining independence from parents, moving out of the family home, developing different relationships with parents, peers and romantic partners and of course, finding a job or career, are somewhat problematic, if not impossible to fulfil. We think these present young people with significant challenges in gaining adult status.

Does your passage to adulthood have an impact on your chances of getting a job?

Different journeys to adulthood

Some researchers claim that young people in their mid-twenties lack self-awareness, do not have organisational or decision-making skills, lack communication and relationship-building abilities and don’t possess the insights and qualities necessary for the transition into working life.

But is that really true for all young people? Gender, social class, and race, differences within the welfare system and government policies, as well as prevailing stereotypes and attitudes about youth, all combine to create enormous differences in the ways that young people move into adulthood.

So our section of the test aims to explore young adults’ views of themselves. Do young people see themselves more as adults? Or as adolescents? Or perhaps as ‘in-betweeners’? Or does it depend on the situation? Do people feel they have good job-seeking skills? And does everyone know how to make effective approaches to potential employers? Does it make a difference to your ability to find a job, if you still have parental support or if you live more independently? In summary, we are trying to find out how different individual and societal influences combine to enhance the chances young people have of finding employment, and thus prepare them for the route to full adulthood.