Parents should urge their children to get part-time job rather than doing well in exams' Business leaders warns

Parents are too obsessed by their children doing brilliantly in exams and are over-looking the importance of them getting a job, according to the Government-backed Women’s Business Council.
When they are young, it is also extremely useful for a child to get a part-time job, such as working in a local shop on a Saturday, it said.
Sue O’Brien, from the Women’s Business Council, who is also chief executive of the recruitment company Norman Broadbent, said there has been a ‘huge change’ over the last decade.

It used to be commonplace for children to do part-time jobs while they were at school, but this trend has now been overtaken by many parents’ obsession with academic excellence.
As a result, a generation of children are leaving school or university with little or no real experience of the workplace, which leaves them totally unprepared for working life.


Mrs O’Brien said parents should think twice before pressurising their children to achieve top grades to the exclusion of anything else.
She said: ‘I think it is the pressure that we are putting children under to excel and exceed in academic life.
‘It means that they then don’t get the practical work experience of: "This is what it is going to be like to find a job when I leave school".'

She added: ‘There are an awful lot of graduates leaving university at the moment who literally have got no work experience at all. It is a huge deficit.’
She raised fears some schools are discouraging pupils from getting a part-time job because they worry it will disrupt their academic studies and consequently hit the school’s performance in league tables.
Mrs O’Brien said: ‘I think they [schools] can often advise children: "Don’t get a Saturday job. Focus on your education", particularly because they want to improve their performance on tables.
‘You need to have employable young people leaving our education system. That is not just about their academic ability.’

This is so true especially in Nigeria, where graduates are certain not to find jobs after graduation. This is why Polytechnic's one year industrial attachment has made their graduates more useful in some sector of the economy than university graduates.