The BBC Dragon and recruitment entrepreneur James Caan says work experience should count towards degrees, with students gaining extra marks from experience gained in the workplace.
Caan, who has a new book out this week called Get the Job You Really Want, was a late entrant to further education himself, graduating from Harvard Business School in 2003 although he started his first company in 1985. He had dropped out of school aged 16.
“I have found over the years that graduates can fill three pages with details of their dissertations yet tell prospective employers nothing about their practical experience,” said Caan. “How does the employer know whether they have the discipline to turn up for work every day? Whether they can take on responsibility? Or whether they are prepared to knuckle down to a task?”
Caan added: “I was giving a talk at Cambridge University. There were 300 graduates in the room and I am sure many of them were sitting there thinking, ‘I’d love to work for someone like James Caan’. Yet only a handful waited until the conference was finished and approached me directly. They were the few who had the confidence and the initiative to make their mark in the job market.”
According to Caan, some universities are already considering methods of incorporating work and business skills in their degree programmes. Paul Jackson, director of student support and development at the University of Leicester, said the university is “looking closely at how to embed corporate skills into the curriculum at the undergraduate stage”.
University College London (UCL) is believed to be looking at ways of translating job skills into degree credits and Durham University may also award additional marks for work experience.
Caan made his fortune after founding and subsequently selling the Alexander Mann recruitment company, also co-founding the headhunting firm Humana International, which he later sold. He called his first firm Alexander Mann to make it appear that there were at least two recruitment experts involved: Caan and the entirely fictitious Mann.
Speaking to the NS recently, Caan said: “While I was at Harvard Business School everyone kept talking about private equity, so I thought, ‘I could do that.’ ” On his return to the UK he set up the private equity firm Hamilton Bradshaw, choosing the name almost randomly, he told us, “Because I wanted it to have a certain weight, and if anyone complained about something then I could tell them it was Hamilton or Bradshaw’s fault.”
Hamilton Bradshaw’s investments now turn over more than £400m per year.
Caan also confided that, after he made no investments at all in the first week of Dragon’s Den back in 2007, his wife urged him to take a stake in something, before people began to take him for being too risk-averse or even “a bit grumpy”. He vowed to invest in the very next opportunity that came through the door, and that happened to be a firm making treadmills for dogs – Fit Fur Life.
Despite much ribbing from his rivals in Dragon’s Den for investing £100,000 in the firm, he helped it triple its income in two years.
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