“Before your child even gets to the job application stage, they can now be helped by online specialists”.

That would be a naïve hope. The next and latest way of helping your offspring is in getting the right job. Costly, of course, but maybe a successful way of ensuring they start off on the right footing. So if you’re worried that your son or daughter hasn’t a clue what career direction to take and doesn’t have the “soft skills” that company recruiters are looking for, then get out your credit card once more.

You can start by ticking off where your child stands. These are requisite “soft
skills” compiled by the i-graduate (i-graduate.org) employer barometer as
crucial to job success.

1 Communication skills
2 Confidence
3 Planning and organisational skills
4 Passion
5 Analysis and decision-making skills
6 Literacy
7 Commercial awareness
8 Relevant work experience
9 Personal development skills

Scoring no ticks should panic you into action. It is never too early to start, according to Future Prospect, a company that offers work prospects tutoring. “When faced with the freedom of university after the enclosed environment of school it’s easy to drop the ball, to say you’ll think about a job some time in the future,” says Future Prospect founder Nick Bedford, a former investment banker. “We get undergraduates to think about it from the very beginning.”

Their team includes former Master of Marlborough College Edward Gould, who believes that although independent schools generally give “a much more rounded education,” the current “atomistic and mechanical” exams procedure leaves great holes in their range of skills and interests.

Of course the best sort of work experience helps you discover what you’re interested in. But in today’s competitive student marketplace you must already know your strengths and interests before you so much as think of applying. This is where Future Prospect comes in. For a fee of £4,000, it will work with your child from undergraduate days and coach them in employment prospects for the next four years (or any shorter period up to three months).

Using one-to-one consultants, Future Prospect nudges young people towards discovering their strengths and weaknesses while keeping them focused on the absolute need for relevant work experience. “We’ll help them, but we don’t spoon-feed them,” says Bedford. “We encourage initiative. They’re adults, after all; we want them to find out for themselves what’s right.”

Georgina Macpherson has just signed up her 18-year-old son Charlie – on his own volition. “What I love about Future Prospect is that it takes the parent out of
the equation,” she says, “It’s nice for students to know they’re on the right track and don’t have to turn to their parents for everything. In over-helping our children, we disempower them.”

Out there in the work marketplace, employers are getting far tougher in selecting graduates for a job. Online psychometric testing is increasingly popular and a way to delve further into a prospective candidate’s qualities as opposed to qualifications. Banking is one of the most competitive careers, internships begin here for school students from 16 upwards. The global investment bank JPMorgan, for example, goes into selected schools to identify high-fliers and offers them summer work placements which may well develop into eventual job offers.

Online recruitment is now the preferred way to contact jobseekers according to the Association of Graduate Recruiters’ summer survey of 2007. They say that nearly 77% of 219 companies who responded accept only online applications.

To cater for this trend, www.milkround.com offers services to employers and provides information for job seekers. It boasts a database of some 300,000 students already registered with them. Now it has a further website called
www.SecondPost.com that helps graduates who already have work experience.

Before your child even gets to the job application stage, they can now be helped by online specialists who help find an internship or industrial placement at home or abroad. One of these is wwwgraduatejobsnetwork.com, a 21st-century-style finishing school, where graduates can, it claims, get ahead in the race for the first job. You pay £5,000 for 10 intensive weeks in which your already impeccably educated son or daughter gets experience in some of those vital “soft skills”: marketing, journalism, accounts and office administration. This is done in a novel way, by them producing an online careers magazine. GraduateJobsNetwork founder is Heather McGregor.
A former investment banker turned head-hunter, she would like it simply to be seen as coaching. “You coach your child for Oxbridge; this is coaching them for getting a job.”

You may well splutter into your marmalade at the cost. What was all that education about if not to make them ready to take on the world? To some though, it is a godsend.

“It sounds like an excellent service” says graduate Laura Binney. “I wish I could have done something like this. As competition between graduates increases, the value of gaining a degree lessens every day, and even getting unpaid work experience at a reputable company is virtually impossible. This looks like a valuable and necessary method of entry into the world of work for those with deep enough pockets.”

To others, however, it is an invidious example of élitism at its worst. “This
sort of company should be banned,” wrote recent graduate Robert Richardson to The Times. “It’s a complete insult to anybody who has spent their young life
working for a chance at a top job. It makes degrees pointless if you simply
hand over a cheque for the work experience that will land you a top job.”

Mother and City graduate recruiter Helen Williams is infuriated by the idea. “When will my generation stop over-managing their kids and let them take some initiative themselves? I see far too many applicants who are there because their parents want them to be and not because it is what they really want. Our role as parents is to equip them to lead an independent life. Generation Y is so used to letting us sort it for them.”

“Work experience?” cries a frantic editor at the Western Mail newspaper, who wishes to remain anonymous. “It strikes terror into our hearts. Useless wretches who come in here to sit beside you, watching – very inhibiting if you’re trying to think of a snappy headline.”

“Yes, it IS contentious getting people to pay £100 a day for work experience,”
Heather McGregor agrees, “but the problem with it not being paid for is that
no-one has the time to structure it properly. I’ve put a lot of time, effort and money into this.”

It was her own experience as a mother, dreading organising work placements for her eldest son in the sixth form (she has two younger ones at prep school) that first inspired her.

“When I look at a young person’s CV I immediately assume their parents have set up the work experience for them – which is, let us be honest, often the case. Is that initiative?” she asks. She has a point. All too often work experience is the result of parents pulling hard on godparents, contacts and friendship strings. The result is foisting their youngster on friends in an office or environment where they’re often too busy to find them things to do. So they sit around texting their friends – then put the experience on their cv.

McGregor’s first intention was simply to set up an on-line careers magazine, GraduateJobs Network, staffed by seven professionals. “Then I thought, why don’t we put in 20 extra desks if we’re leasing a new office and hiring more staff? So we’ve built into the magazine’s production regime the capacity to have 20 extra people aged 18 to 25, who will hot-desk it round the company learning the different facets of the business while receiving high-octane careers coaching at the same time.”

McGregor sees her service as akin to the old system of apprenticeships, where you paid a tradesman to learn by their side. “Companies of any size should have a programme for internships, just as they do on the continent,” she says. “I’d like to think people would copy what I’m doing.”

Leaving it to chance, to beseeching friends, to heaven forbid, your child finding something themselves is simply not enough for some parents. At least there are some alternatives now that may sap your bank balance, but also bring peace of mind let alone the chance of success.

Graduatejobsnetwork.com 020 7100 9120
Futureprospect.co.uk 020 7953 4003