Why is the careers fair always dominated by boring corporate firms?

Like all top unis, Lufbra boasts fantastic business connections and helps eager undergrads get onto grad schemes and placements at some of the biggest firms in the country. 

But uni bigwigs seem to sometimes miss the mark when it comes to meeting the needs of all their students.

Like so many other humanities undergrads, I have little interest in working for BT or IBM as a “Statistics and Data Analyst”, generating hundreds of formulas on an Excel spreadsheet all day.

I’d rather use the skills I’ve developed over the past four years in more creative industries, where I am free to innovate and explore original ideas.

If Lufbra really is one of the leading universities in the UK for grad schemes, why do these placement fairs only cater for Business, Accounting and Engineering students?

Understandably, the university has to be realistic in terms of the number of businesses that come to the event, as well as how it isn’t always possible to appeal to all tastes.

But these events seem to price out smaller companies which tend to appeal to a large number of arts and design students. Obviously, this isn’t the uni’s fault, but I do feel something needs to be put in place for arts students.

Otherwise, more and more students will have meetings with careers advisers like the one I had last year. When I asked the advisor about journalism and media work, he replied: “Have you thought about going into Marketing or HR? If you got a B in GCSE Maths you could become an Accountant.”

The optimistic walk to the careers fair

Emelie, a second year English student who attended the careers fair, said she felt disenfranchised by the lack of diversity:

“I’m definitely unsure about what I want to do career wise, so I am looking at doing some sort of Easter or Summer placement to get a feel for what I want to do.

“But, due to the fair being dominated mostly by the larger firms, I found that they only offered placement year opportunities.

“I definitely felt that the fair was aimed at career focused degrees, and I didn’t particularly find anything that was either suited to me or would want a person without a specific career focused degree.”

Amil, a Design Ergonomics Finalist, agreed: “There are no design consultancies. For an up and coming design uni this is disgraceful”.

Although there was an Arts Careers fair toward the end of last academic year, the company turnout was extremely poor – especially considering our status as a leading uni regularly topping graduate employment tables.

The uni could subside smaller companies’ travel and put on a comprehensive creative careers fair that would benefit students from all disciplines, enabling them to see what other opportunities are available to them outside the narrow confines of the corporate business world.

It seems as if these big corporate businesses will hire anybody and then mould them into their ideal employee. By allowing such businesses to dominate the careers fair, the uni is quashing the individuality of its brightest students and undermining the values of diversity and creativity it claims to promote.