Regional graduate schemes offer viable alternative to big city life

Graduates who view London as the only place to work may be missing out on the benefits of many regional schemes.

Location, location, location may be all-important when it comes to buying a house, but what about when starting your career? The chances are many graduates will again turn to London: this year's High Fliers UK Graduate Careers Survey showed the capital is the preferred employment destination for 48% of graduate job hunters and first choice career destination for students at 25 of the 30 universities surveyed.

But despite the depressed state of the jobs market, it may come as a surprise that some of the UK's biggest employers struggle to fill places on their graduate schemes based in regional offices due to a lack of interest from applicants.

Stephen Isherwood, head of graduate recruitment at accountants Ernst & Young, says while the company has around 700 graduate trainee places each year, it often has trouble filling its regionally based ones. "It's more in the satellite offices to London – Reading, Southampton or Luton, for example – where we see less demand," he says. Offices such as Aberdeen and Inverness also tend to be hard to fill because of their geographical remoteness."

Andrew Whitmore, assistant director of the University of Manchester careers service, says graduates often prefer to stay in the large metropolitan areas to retain links with their circle of university friends, but in a squeezed jobs market they may be missing a trick by narrowing their options in this way.

"In London and the bigger cities, you get a lot of head offices and specialist functions," he says. "You'll find that graduate schemes there are pretty much full, but that may not necessarily be the case for Croydon or Milton Keynes, for example.

"In Manchester a lot of students want to work in the city centre, but they're not so keen to go to Oldham or Wilmslow, or other places to the north and south," Whitmore says. "We run some one-year paid placements and I recall someone very cannily saying, 'I'm not applying for the city centre, I'm going for Middlewich in east Cheshire, because I don't think other students will want to go there.' He's right; we won't get many applicants for that placement, probably half a dozen. But anything in the city centre, we'll get 200-300 applications."

Outside London, the financial services scene tends to be dominated by small groups of local firms, such as in Bristol, where Hargreaves Lansdown employs around 650 people. Even so, Hargreaves Lansdown last year reportedly struggled to fill its graduate scheme.

Peter Hargreaves, the firm's chief executive, admits that while Bristol cannot compete with the variety of careers the capital can offer, regionally based firms can still be great places to start out. "It's easier to be noticed in a provincial firm," he says. "And once people get a job in London it can be very difficult for them to leave again unless it's for lifestyle reasons, so it's a very good place to start."

Ernst & Young's Isherwood says it is often a combination of location and the kind of work on offer that puts graduates off. "Vacancies for tax work in a regional office can be hard to fill, for example," he says. "But the career path is exactly the same, other than that you might find yourself working in slightly smaller teams."

Added to which, says Hargreaves, there are simpler reasons to want to work outside London. "It's a much nicer life," he claims. "Most of my staff cycle or walk to work and their working day is shorter because they spend less time commuting. And there's a better social life attached to regional firms, in that people tend to live closer together."

Source: Graham Snowdon, Guardian.co.uk, Friday 26th August 2011