The test that could open doors (or not)

When nearly everyone goes to college, degrees start to lose their value, and graduates have to find other ways of pushing themselves into jobs. Britain's employers no longer hold degrees in the same reverence as before, and given the rise of small service and technology sector companies with highly-qualified workforces, graduates are now trying to sell themselves to firms with no formalised recruitment set-up; once again, personality wins the day.

The gap in the recruitment market thus appears more like a chasm, especially as Britain's education system still believes its first duty is to equip its children with qualifications, rather than employability. Step forward Jonathan Brill, the man behind the newly-launched Graduate Employ-ability Test.

Depending on your viewpoint, this could be a very expensive piece of paper (#85 plus VAT) coming as it does at the end of a debt-filled course, telling you what you already know about yourself. It could also be the one thing that makes employers notice you, especially if you can wave it in the air and say ''This proves I'm a good communicator, team player and motivator''.

It could be a sinister database on the best and brightest brains in the county. If Brill's hopes prove true, it could become a nationwide standard of assessment.

Brill, a product of Hutchesons Grammar School in Glasgow and son of Scots actress Edith Brill, has been in education for years, advising on the running of polytechnics, and drama and arts schools.

''I have seen so much waste, in terms of students coming out after three years and being really useful, and not getting a chance to shine anywhere. My career has been largely in the soft area of the humanities and there are large numbers of students who write themselves off far too early. It was that sense of loss that motivated me, a genuine sense of righting a wrong that needed to be righted.''

British employers and colleges fail to recognise, he says, that many skills students learn are transferrable from the narrow academic context to the world of work.

''It's often assumed that a drama student has only limited skills and that, if you fail to get a job as an actor, there's nothing else you can do; but there are two clear levels of skill which a drama student has, which you can test. One is communication skills and the other is teamwork. You can't go on a stage without collaborating with other actors. Teamwork is what I am told is the future of industry in this country.''

For the last few years he has been devising a three-part test graduates could take which would prove their ''nous'' over and above their paper qualifications, drawing on best-practice American and British models. Students book the test, sit down at a computer screen at a designated local centre, and a series of questions is downloaded from a central information bank (so no two students get the same paper).

Brill refuses to let questions be reproduced ''out of context'' so we're limited to a description. The first part tests computing skills, from the very basic (almost insulting to today's computer-literate generation but, as Brill points out, mature students who missed out on computing are growing in number) to word-processing proficiency.

Part two is problem-solving for business with multiple- choice answers, covering anything from green issues to exchange rates.

Part three is a quasi-psychometric test along the lines of ''I have x quality, agree strongly, disagree strongly'' statements.

The results are designed to show employers whether this is a candidate worth interviewing, although students could take the conclusions as a form of rough career guidance and target their job hunting more narrowly. Given the nature of our education system, the test is a late bolt-on addition to a graduate's career strategy, and its use (and value for money) depends on nationwide recognition.

Not guaranteed, accepts Brill, but he points to approaches from commercial interests hoping to buy the data as evidence of its possible impact. He is willing to make anonymous data available free of charge to ''official'' organisations for research, but has declined the commercial offers.

One could argue that it merely allows those who shine anyway to shine even brighter; those who come out of the test gazing at ''poor communicator'' and ''sole operator'' scores won't be waving them about at the interviews, one imagines.

It is ironic that students should pay to weed themselves out of the graduate thicket because all but the best employers, Brill points out, try to avoid the cost of training up the rawest recruits and will go for the ones who can work a computer and sort out how to appease the disgruntled customer by instinct.

That said, it has the endorsement of such as Mercedes, and the consortium of expertise Brill has gathered to develope and promote it include BTEC, Sylavan Prometric, National Computing Counci,l and Saville and Holdsworth. Brill argues that it is, above all, fair, giving an objective opinion of a student's business abilities which overrides the self-selecting CV, and eradicating the advantage conferred by ''preferred'' universities that em-ployers always seem to go for.

He also hopes the existence of the test, by its very nature a reproach, will focus the education industry on how it prepares its clients, our children, for life after the classroom.

If skills can be reappraised as transferrable, then learning should be recognised as lifelong, he says. Some 60% of the skills used in today's car- making industry will be obsolete by the year 2005, for example. It's not what you learned at college, but how you apply the lessons that really matter.

The first two students in the country to sit the test were Iain Caldwell, 22, who is taking a masters in computing at Glasgow Caledonian University after his initial accounting degree proved insufficient to beat off the competition in the cut-throat accountancy jobs market, and Jim Ramsay, also 22, Glasgow Caledonian marketing and communications graduate who has just finished a sabbatical year as vice-president, student affairs.

Caldwell also founded the student paper and was treasurer of the student association, ''in charge of a company with a turnover of #1.5m, as I put on a CV''. All the more reason to be disappointed that employers weren't biting.

They really sat the test because it was offered free, and although both did well, neither raves about it or its potential. They do, however, talk at length about the problem of making your CV stand out from the 200 others on the personnel manager's desk, which is Jonathan Brill's point exactly.

''I do wonder as to how beneficial it is,'' says Ramsay. ''It think it's all related to getting it established. If you knew it would help to get you a job, I would guarantee students would go for it. There's this desperation there. You are so keyed up to getting a job.''

Caldwell describes the current student condition. ''Students are getting lower and lower and lower. After four years of hard slog, suddenly they've left college, they're on the dole, #35 a week, and probably haven't got enough money to get a suit for the first job interview.'' Not the best time to suggest investing in the GET.

''There are so many people applying for the same job. You need something that distinguishes you from the next person. It all comes down to whether it becomes a benchmark. If it is, employers aren't going to spend five hours sifting through CVs, they're just going to go down and look at the mark. You could tell the computer to work out the top 10 average, and off you go.''

q Graduate Employability Test: details on 0800 592 873

What the first two guinea pigs thought