Each year, graduates of colleges and trade programs enter the job market with new credentials and high hopes. But many discover that positions matching their qualifications are few and far between.
Faced with disappointing offers, they hesitate to settle, turn down low-level jobs, and keep searching. But are they expecting too much?
Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Livia Alfonsi suggests that job seekers can check their perceptions by speaking directly with workers a few steps ahead in the field. In a study conducted in Uganda that carries implications far beyond its borders, Alfonsi found that mentorship programs can dramatically improve career outcomes for job seekers, not only by supplying networking connections, but by helping people recalibrate their expectations.
There was always a hovering sense of, OK, now that they’ve got the skills, what next?
“At least in the beginning, people tend to have a positive outlook and think about all the possibilities they can get,” says Alfonsi. Success, she says, doesn’t mean giving up on one’s dreams, but rather crafting a more realistic plan to get there.
Embracing reality might be particularly necessary now. The US unemployment rate for new entrants, including recent college graduates, hit a nine-year peak this year, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows. Indeed, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell acknowledged in September that young people are having a harder time locking down work and pointed to a “low-firing, low-hiring environment” that’s making it especially tough to break into the workforce.
While training and education ultimately do pay off for students, it can take longer to see the results many expect immediately, Alfonsi says.
Pairing mentors with job seekers
Uganda, like many African countries, struggles with chronic youth unemployment; about 30% of young adults are jobless. The country has attempted to address the problem by offering skills-training programs to educate young people in hairdressing, construction, manufacturing, and other trades.
Alfonsi, who studied the programs in Uganda, found that equipping young people with practical skills helped them find stable work. Still, some continued to struggle.
“There was always a hovering sense of, OK, now that they’ve got the skills, what next?” she recalls. Oftentimes, graduates spent years searching before finding a job matching their new skillset—and many gave up trying along the way.
In many cases, graduates expected to leap into jobs related to their training right away, but were offered entry-level roles, such as sweeping floors at a hair salon or digging holes at construction sites. Many rejected those opportunities and kept searching for better prospects.
Learning to be patient
To help guide their job search efforts, Alfonsi helped set up a mentorship program called “Meet Your Future,” pairing current students with alumni who had successfully navigated the job market and had found work in their chosen trades.
She describes the program and its results in the working paper “Meet Your Future: Experimental Evidence on the Labor Market Effects of Mentors.” The paper, which was released in June, was cowritten with Mary Namubiru, a fellow with the development organization BRAC Uganda, and Sara Spaziani, assistant professor at the University of Warwick.
Mentors weren’t given extensive training and were told to simply share their experiences and listen to understand what mentees needed. The only requirement was to meet with job seekers at least three times, though in practice, many met more often and developed ongoing relationships.
In recordings of the meetings, mentors shared plenty of practical advice, such as how to craft a resume or prepare for a job interview. But that wasn’t the information mentees were drawn to, Alfonsi says. Instead, they were most likely to be inspired by encouragement and a more realistic framing of the trajectory in their field.
“The main takeaways were the importance of patience, the need to push through, the idea that you have to ‘suck it up’ and get through the first stage,” Alfonsi says.
Building realistic expectations
The impact of the mentor program was significant. For one thing, graduates were more likely to take entry-level positions in hopes of later using them as stepping stones to more fulfilling careers. And mentored students revised their overly optimistic salary expectations about their immediate post-graduation prospects, which, on average, had been nearly six times higher than their actual earnings. In addition, compared to students who weren’t mentored, mentees were:
25% less likely to reject job offers, leading them to secure employment more quickly.
27% less likely to exit the labor force.
Earning 18% more than their unmentored peers within a year.
By the numbers
Alfonsi and fellow researchers found that compared to people who weren’t coached, mentored students were:
- 15%More likely to be employed in the sector of their training.
- 8%More days spent working in a role three months after graduation.
