A few years ago, the charity Education and Employers asked more than 13,000 UK primary school children to draw the job they wanted to do when they grew up. The results were published as a report called Drawing the Future, and one finding has stuck with a lot of people who work in education since.
The majority of those children (over 60%) did not know a single person who actually did the job they’d drawn.
They’d got the idea from somewhere – television, mostly. Among the children who did know someone doing the job, it was almost always a parent or a relative. Which suggests something uncomfortable but not surprising: what a young person believes is possible is shaped largely by who they happen to have met.
This is the gap filled by the Alumni Wall
Our Alumni Wall is a simple thing. It’s a page on the Lincoln College Group alumni website where former students share a few details – the course they did, the year they left, what they’re doing now – along with a line or two in their own words about what the place meant to them. Some are recent leavers, some finished decades ago. They work in construction, care, finance, hairdressing, engineering, teaching and a hundred other things.
Individually, none of these profiles is remarkable. Collectively, they’re a map. And for a seventeen-year-old sitting in a classroom at the College right now, wondering whether the thing they’re studying actually leads anywhere, a map is exactly what’s missing.
“But my career hasn’t been that interesting”
This is the objection we hear most, and it’s worth looking at – because the people who say it are usually wrong about what’s actually useful.
The stories that land hardest aren’t the meteoric ones. They’re the ones with a wobble in them. The person who started one course and switched. The one who left, worked for three years, then came back.
A student who’s quietly worried they’ve made the wrong choice doesn’t need to hear from someone whose path was a straight line. They need to hear from someone whose path wasn’t.
Try this: When you get to “My time at college helped me…”, resist the urge to make it sound impressive. “…realise I was better at practical work than exams” is worth more to a current student than any job title.
There’s evidence this matters, too
It isn’t only sentiment. Research by Education and Employers found that young adults who recalled four or more encounters with the world of work at school were five times more likely to be in education, employment or training – and earned on average 16% more than peers who recalled none. That’s survey recall rather than a controlled trial, but the direction is clear enough: contact with real working people can change outcomes.
Most alumni will never do a careers talk. A profile takes five minutes and has the potential to reach far more students than an afternoon in a school hall ever could.
What we actually ask for
Less than you might expect, and there’s no essay involved. A few details – your name, email, the year you left and what you’re doing now – and then some sentences to finish:
I would describe college as…
My favourite thing about college was…
My time at college helped me…
I loved my course(s) at college because…
My fondest memory of college is…
You don’t have to do them all. Pick the two that come easily and leave the rest – most people find one of them unlocks something they hadn’t thought about in years.
Pro tip: Don’t draft it. Answer the sentence that made you smile when you read it, in whatever words turn up first. The unpolished ones always read better than the careful ones.
And if you’d rather tell the longer version, we’re always glad to hear from alumni who’d like to do a full interview. Just reply and say so.
Your route from the College to here probably feels ordinary to you. To someone currently deciding whether people like them end up in places like that, it isn’t ordinary at all.
Five minutes. Just click here and have a go.