Changing the system - Giving opportunity to everyone.

Before coming to France, I used to think that to have access to a Master’s degree, people needed to have certain amount of work experience. I come from Costa Rica, and through my professional experience I had the opportunity to work with several countries of Latin America. From where I come from, the way the education and professional system has been set up is: after high school people access a bachelor degree that last between 3 to 5 years depending on the program and university. Then, of course, depending on every person’s situation, some people will work and study at the same time, others will start working after graduating. 

People start in junior positions, and through experience starts climbing the hierarchical ladder. There will come a time in their professional careers where they will realise that to get to the next stage of their career they need to upgrade their knowledge and skills. It is at that moment that people get to a master’s degree program. In average it can come after having a minimum of 2 years of work experience, but in some people’s cases it can come after having 10 or 15 years of work experience. 

Based on my personal experience, that is exactly what happened. After 6 years of work experience in different fields and positions, I realised that in order to get to my professional goal I needed to get some experience and knowledge that I was not going to get from the professional environment. At that moment, I quit my job and I moved to Paris to study a Master in Management. 

When I came to this side of the world, I realised how different things were. I had colleagues that were a lot younger than me. Some of them had never worked, and some of them started the master’s degree program right after getting their bachelor’s degree.

When I started working as a recruitment manager at Oreegami, I started recruiting profiles based on how the French market works. I started noticing certain things: 

1. Most people that have applied to our program were people that had little work experience (6 months internship) 
2. Most people that have applied to our program already had a Bac+5 (master degree)
3. People’s mindset is based on a scientific or literary career choice, made in high school at the age of 15 -16 years old approximately. 
4. People have been struggling to find a job because they did not study in certain schools with strong brands. 
5. If a person decides to make a professional reorientation, the person will struggle to have the opportunity to change, since for a lot of companies is less riskier to hire someone that already had some experience in the position or field than someone that comes from the outside.  

After almost 2 years of experience recruiting in France, I have been having these internal conflicts based on these things that I have been noticing. 

I have read articles regarding the unemployment rate, or interviewed companies that mentioned having trouble finding profiles because apparently there is a lack of profiles in the market or that companies struggle to find the right profiles. According to the statistics of the last quarter of 2019, there are 1 955 100 unemployed people between 25 and 49 years old just in metropolitan France. (Source : P?le emploi-Dares, STMT, données CVS-CJO.) 

Based on the experience that I have had as a recruiter these are my thoughts: 

There is a problem in the education system. Asking a 15 year old to choose a particular career path is kind of reckless. At 15 years old you have not experienced enough to know what are your real passions, the things that driven you professionally, you are in the middle of your teenage years. You are discovering who you are as a person, what are the things that you like (if at 15 years old a person already knows what he/she wants to do for the rest of her life, that is a pretty lucky person). Having to make a choice that will define your entire future at a young age, makes that 10 years later some people will be looking for a professional reorientation because they did not make the right choice. 

Sometimes people make this choice based on social or family pressures. Sometimes because they have some idea of what certain jobs might be but they have not experienced enough to know if it is something that they actually like. Sometimes because they need to choose something, but not necessarily because it is something they might actually like. Sometimes they do not even have certain guidance or counseling to see what is the best option for them. 

Having grown with this system and with this mindset makes people do not question themselves. The same system had made people do a bachelor degree (bac+3) and then follow immediately to a master’s degree program (bac+5) without having touched for more than 2 years the job position and work environment. Depending on the program and university some people had the opportunity to do work and study programs of 1 year, others had to do an internship between 3 to 6 months to graduate and go to the next step. 

3 months, 6 months or 1 year is quite short to actually have certain experiences that might be helpful to decide which is the right master program to follow. Instead of that, they follow the program that makes “more sense” regarding the bachelor they had pursuit.

Once they finished the master program and they start looking for a job, a lot of people find a big barrier: companies ask the degree and a certain number of experience to access a junior job position. Other companies ask all of that and on top they make their profile selection based on the top schools in the market limiting the access to students that for “x” or “y” reason did not study on those schools. Others have the problem that they did not went to the “right” school, they do not have the “right” diploma and they do not have the minimum required experience to access the position.

You find people frustrated, looking for a job for a year or more, trying to find a career either in their career of choice, either in a completely new field once they realised that they wanted to do something different than the choice they did when they were younger. 

Companies have a hard time giving the opportunity to people that are trying to give a new shape to their careers, because these are people that do not fit all the little cases in their job description. 

We have been recruiting good profiles, with a lot of different good skills that only need someone that can give them the opportunity to show what a good asset they are for a company. These are profiles that might not match the box. Profiles that are really good working with numbers even though they followed a literary career path. Profiles that are really good doing marketing even though they study chemistry for example. 

This is what the market needs. Companies giving the opportunity to the “atypical profiles”, the “out of the box” kind of profiles, because is in those profiles that you can find real gold mines. People motivated, willing to learn, to work, to stay in their job positions and start climbing the ladder how it is supposed to. 

Changing the system is not easy, but is by changing the mindset and the way to see things that real impacts can happen.