The UK government is willing, but are their graduates ready?

This week, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the UK launched an EU careers month in order to make UK graduates aware of employment opportunities in the various EU institutions. Currently, only 6% of the EU’s workforce is British, despite the fact that the UK represents 12% of the EU’s population. In last year’s EU recruitment competition the UK produced the lowest number of applicants. Unsurprising, given that a survey conducted by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office found that 81% of surveyed students had never heard of the competitions. The negative implications of this are numerous, but the overarching problem is simple: the UK is not adequately represented in the EU’s multilayered policymaking process. Consequently, the need make able UK graduates aware of employment opportunities in the EU seems to be imperative.

However, there are a few complex hurdles to be cleared first. The first is the UK’s perennial euroscepticism, which is reinforced by the UK’s almost universally euro-hostile popular media. The second is the steadily declining pool of graduates able to fulfill the basic language requirements of the EU civil service.

The first hurdle appears to be the more difficult to combat. The UK is historically a reluctant EU member, and anti-EU sentiment has been on the rise since the 1980’s. This is aggravated by the fact that the UK’s popular press is profoundly critical of the EU, and in particular of ‘Brussels’, which is presented as a cesspit of venality and indulgence. Whether the UK’s euroscepticism influences the press or vice versa is a longer research question, but suffice to say that the UK press does a good job of misinforming the British public as regards the EU. This can be seen by looking at the EU’s Euromyth website, which aims to dispel some of the myths bouncing around the EU sphere, and is almost entirely made up of stories originating in the popular British dailies. This is not surprising, given that most UK dailies do not in fact have a full time correspondent in Brussels. Such a hostile environment does not breed an eager pool of EU civil servants.

However, it is the second hurdle that poses the biggest problem for EU employers searching for employable UK graduates. The fact that the EU requires functionaries to speak another official EU language apart from their own is a big problem for the UK’s primarily monolingual graduate pool, which has continued to grow since languages became a voluntary qualification in 2004. French and German – the two other official languages of the EU aside from English – have proven particularly unpopular since they became voluntary subjects. Without these language skills graduates are unable to even pass the screening stages of the EU civil service.

As a result, this awareness drive is left with a limited audience. By the time students are searching for a graduate position, the chance to learn an additional language (without incurring gargantuan costs) has been missed. Therefore, it must be hoped that future initiatives will seek to address the information deficit at an earlier stage of the education process.