UK Youngsters Snub a 'Boring' Career in the City

The bright lights and big rewards of working in the City do not appeal to young people, as the next generation of UK workers consider working in the financial sector as "boring".

According to Chartered Institute for Securities & Investment (CISI), which commissioned pollster YouGov to question more than 2,000 young people, parents and teachers, more than half of young people (53%) described working in the City as "boring".

The study also found that 50% of the respondents felt it would be "full of numbers", while only 24% of young people felt they had any understanding of jobs in the financial sector.

Less than one in ten of young people said they would be interested in working in financial services, but the highest proportion (34%) expressed an interest in working in technology.

"Lack of understanding of financial services as a sector is one of the main points which has come through in this survey and we are very keen to continue working with teachers to help them overcome these obstacles," said Simon Cuhane, the chief executive of the CISI.

"With some of the highest UK graduate salaries being available in the investment banking sector, we should not undersell to our young people the fact that financial services offers excellent opportunities for a good, exciting and rewarding career."

The CISI said the majority of young people chose the internet (59%) and parents (58%) as primary sources of information about jobs in financial services, with teachers ranked third as the most used sources (39%) for information on jobs in the sector.

Although financial services was felt by parents to be the sixth, in a list of 11, most important professional field in the UK (32%), after engineering (34%) and law (37%), with healthcare considered the most important (67%), only 23% of parents indicated they had a "fair" or "strong" understanding of financial services as a sector.

Parents' understanding of financial services was also low at 23%, although it was greater (32%) for those parents based in London.

When parents were asked what they thought helps a young person most when trying to get a job in financial services, almost half (49%) of parents felt professional qualifications are a key factor, followed by good contacts (38%) and work experience (37%).

Seventy eight per cent of parents tended to agree that working in financial services offers the potential to earn a lot of money, but said it is a "stressful" profession to work in (62%), with 44% of parents agreeing that working in financial services was "not socially responsible".