Career Services London
Jobshops and Job Opps
Although they’d rather their students didn’t have to work for money, most universities came to terms with the reality of the situation a while ago.
So rather than leave students tramping around various establishments, CV in one hand and not a clue in the other, most universities now have a jobshop based on campus basically a job agency that finds employment for students and finds students for employers.
This is different from the university careers office, which trys to find jobs for students once they’ve graduated (although the two are often combined into a single service). Jobshops find work during the vacations and, sometimes, part-time jobs during term.
And jobshops do more than your bog standard temp agency apart from anything else, they don’t usually take a slice off your wage packet (or if they do, it’s a smaller one than usual).
The difference for employers is that they specialise in students, which, to many of them, is a good thing. Students tend to be intelligent, keen, polite and, on average, no less reliable than anyone else. And most importantly students are cheap.
The difference for students is that jobshops specialise in jobs for students. The vacancies they’ve got tend to be the ones that have some flexibility over hours, with a boss who understands some of the commitments students have to juggle.
Jobshops are in a good position to do a nice bit of matching. But their responsibilities usually go further - often they’ll exercise a cut-off point on wages.
For most people the minimum wage is £5.73 an hour, but for 18 to 21 year-olds it’s only £4.77 an hour. Many jobshops impose their own minimum at least the legal minimum wage and sometimes higher and they’ll tell employers looking for slave labour to shove it.
Jobshops will sometimes also lay down the law on other things - such as better-than-minimum working conditions, holiday pay and so on. (Even part-time workers are entitled to paid leave.) How successful they are depends on how needy the local job market is.
One of the biggest local employers of students tends to be the university itself, which smacks just a tad of hypocrisy but who’s complaining?
Universities often need people to work in bars, shops, cafés and cafeterias, or cleaning rooms, doing admin work, looking after conference guests, serving drinks at functions, looking after new and prospective students, even phoning former students and asking them to donate generously to the vice-chancellor’s retirement fund. All ideal work for students.
There are often still more jobs going at the SU, which usually manages most of the bars, shops, nightclubs and other non-academic services for students within the university. As often as not, it’s the SU that runs the jobshop and it employs students work there.
Some universities are in areas so devoid of job opportunities that the jobshop doesn’t even bother to try and find jobs for students off ...