Why mentoring is more vital than ever for both graduates and industry
The creative industries need the next generation of talent to help navigate tough times – and mentoring plays a vital role in nurturing that talent, says Susan Smith.
The expectations of any university graduate after finishing years of solid hard work, dedication and endless amounts of peach Schnapps are celebrations and a graduation ceremony – not a global pandemic and a recession, but unfortunately this is the reality that they like everyone else currently face.
Thousands of recent graduates have emerged out of university into arguably one of the most difficult periods ever experienced for society. While it may appear as though graduates are left to their own devices, help and support is often available in the shape of schemes such as the London College of Communication Industry Mentoring Scheme.
Recent popular culture is filled with successful duos, where wise and experienced individuals guide and inspire novices: Del Boy and Rodney or Yoda and Luke Skywalker are two that immediately spring to mind. However, there is a serious purpose to this scheme, where it partners industry experts alongside postgraduates making the transition from university to working life.
The programme attracts some of the best industry minds around, one of whom is Susan Smith, a director at global marketing solutions agency Weber Shandwick, with a career as a brand communication specialist spanning more than 20 years.
Susan became a mentor in 2019 with the aim of providing the type of guidance that she herself would have appreciated as a graduating student. After spotting a LinkedIn post advertising the LCC scheme and with the timing right in her own career, Susan felt ready to embark on supporting emerging creatives.
She says, “ I want to help students make choices about career options by providing insight on what day to day agency life looks like and what clients want from agencies and how to manage a client and agency relationship”.
For those looking to enter the creative industries, this type of insider information is invaluable as the demands and expectations of professional settings are not always made clear while studying at university. As a mentor, Susan will typically spend between two and three hours a month with her assigned graduate, with the time spent either face to face in person, or in more recent times (for obvious reasons), virtually.
“At the start of the programme, I encourage my mentee to put in place a framework for the sessions, a bit like a career plan that any employer would ask for to manage their own career progression”.
As someone with a healthy appetite for ideas, the scheme allows Susan to offer career advice as well as the chance to learn something new herself and validate her own creative thinking. She didn’t know what to expect when joining the scheme but admits that she has been pleasantly surprised.
“ I have seen how focused the students are and the level of knowledge they have. My motivation for signing up was to learn about how we can most effectively integrate younger generations coming into the workplace and to make sure I was remaining current and relevant. It has been reassuring to get affirmation that many of my choices I am making for clients are the right ones”.
“There will always be the need for exceptional talent, especially as agencies look to return to growth and they can only do this with exceptional people” – Susan Smith
The scheme is undoubtedly a two-way street, allowing those in industry to gain insight into trends and how the current crop of postgrads think creatively and execute their ideas. It also builds relationships and networks that can be used to find jobs and allow graduates to have their name and work pushed into the view of potential employers.
Despite primarily being a mentor, Susan has also been further involved with LCC by working with the MA Public Relations students after being invited by course leader Gareth Thompson to provide a working brief. “ I was really happy to help as I was intrigued to see how students would respond unconstrained by practicalities of putting their plan to market. This gave me new ideas that gave me a fresh perspective for my 2021 plans, and I wasn’t disappointed”.
Searching for employment after graduation is tough at the best of times, but when adding the complications of the Coronavirus pandemic into the equation, plus the global recession it has subsequently sparked, it has become even harder.
Post-university life should be filled with excitement and anticipation for the future, but in many cases, graduates are now being forced to re-evaluate their plans. A survey by Prospects on the effects the pandemic has had on graduate employability concluded that for 1,202 graduates, 57% had either lost their job or had it cancelled or deferred.
Work environments have shifted massively, and businesses are holding off on graduate recruitment as they themselves face uncertainty. Offices are relocating or closing, people are turning their dining room tables into make-shift desks and using the spare room as temporary offices, which has meant that the pool of jobs that would have been of interest to graduates is slowly narrowing.
Even for the graduates who didn’t immediately have a job lined up, 64% of those surveyed felt negatively about the prospects of doing so. Susan does provide some reassurance to graduates, saying, “there will always be the need for exceptional talent, especially as agencies look to return to growth and they can only do this with exceptional people”.
Chancellor of Exchequer Rishi Sunak recently said that the UK is “grippling with something that is unprecedented” and of course he meant in economic terms.
Susan says, “ I too graduated in a recession, where a job in the industry was a privilege, not a right. I had kept in touch with a company I had interned with during my final year and upon graduating, I was lucky enough to be taken on full time. Many others had to wait one or two years for an industry opening, instead taking retail and hospitality jobs to fill gaps meanwhile”.
Susan understands what graduates are going through, therefore she is in the perfect position to give knowledgeable advice. At a time when there isn’t a clear and obvious post-graduation pathway for many, mentoring schemes such as LCC’s are able to offer awareness and clarity around the current situation in industry.
While the circumstances for a lot of people is rather bleak, it does provide the golden opportunity to explore new paths that might never have been considered. In the first of what has turned out to be many UK lockdowns, many people with much more time on their hands baked banana bread or started doing 5K runs.
Others reassessed their career options and work-life balance, and new avenues and experiences are something that any mentoring scheme will encourage its participants to research as they seek a positive outcome from a negative situation.
It is vitally important that graduates look to university support schemes as they have always been about established industry professionals ‘giving something back’, and this is especially true in these difficult times when graduates need to grab hold of any and every advantage available to them.
The ‘norm’ isn’t so normal anymore, but that doesn’t mean that graduates should feel isolated. In the past year in particular, we have seen many acts of giving back and people being supportive, but in a very different sense, industry mentors such as Susan Smith, are providing a vital role in supporting the new generations of creatives.