There never was cake. The cake is a lie

So true. I left uni with a 2:1 in CS with a Networks specialisation and got a job, walked in and found I knew nothing about networks. In hindsight what use was a networks degree when I had never touched a router or heard of Cisco?! Yes, i could draw an IP packet structure and explain the TCP/IP protocol, not something I have ever had to do in the real world.

It is wasnt for the grad scheme, I could never have got a job in networks. I may as well have skipped uni, saved the beating my liver got, and done a CCIE

When I left 8 years ago, most of the best grads were in sponsorship schemes with the likes of Nortel and Marconi - and as it turned out they all left with no job to go to.

Given the number of people who came out of these courses, and given the number of brilliant grads in my dept who had no job for months at that time, what hope have the 60% who scraped by?

Mutliply that by the huge rise in these courses available from UK unis and ex-polys today and it isnt a surprise that McDonald's has a continuous employment pool.

And the ridiculous thing is that I have been involved in trying to fill a backlog in recruitment for about a year and there are no candidates with decent experience in the market (it would seem). So its all about that first job still.