Today's graduates: not team players?

So, you haven't heard from me in a while... Sorry

Here's some exciting news to make up for it. I've been invited to sit on The Orange Graduate Panel.

This Panel aims to help organisations understand how to better motivate and support graduates. Sounds self-indulgent on the graduates' part until you comtemplate that most graduates leave their first job within 9 months so there really is a lack of satisfaction out there; moreover, this is expensive if you're an employer both in terms of knowledge and skills built and lost and the cash cost of continuously recruiting. Our findings so far have been summarised by the beeb and the IoD.

The idea is we draw on our own personal experience and give our opinions on life as graduates. I've mainly been lucky; the first two jobs I had after graduating were stimulating; one on Whitehall working with very smart people, another at Library House, working with more very smart people. Both reflected the culture I had come to know at university: that asking difficult questions was a necessity and that a good working environment seeks to encourage and foster this by creating an open atmosphere and setting steep challenges for those that could handle it (at least, that was my experience).

But difficult questions don't always go down well, even if they are for the greater good. A well known Minister who definitely doesn't shop at Tescos looked less than impressed when I naively asked him in my first week why we were promoting the success of a funding scheme by the number of spinouts rather than the quality of them (that's another debate). Equally, I have worked in environments where using those honed skills you developed at university, namely to question assumptions where there is no evidence or to argue conversely in order to better understand the issue is not well received because it is not perceived to be the behaviour of a team player. Rather it implies a lack of belief in the corporate doctrine. When you've lost the freedom to ask questions in an organisation, you're done for.