Graduates and the Law?

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Perhaps the biggest change is that organisations will have to ensure that graduate training programmes are open to people of all ages not just very recent graduate leavers, says Ingham.

Employers will also need to be sure they are being marketed to all age groups and that there is no stipulation on university leaving dates.

"They need to have plenty of opportunities for people who are non-traditional applicants to apply. Their schemes have to be open to older people," Ingham stresses.

The big practical problem at the moment is the sheer lack of detail about what is going to happen come 1 October, says Carl Gilleard, AGR chief executive.

The government's consultation document on the laws appears to suggest graduate training schemes will be able to continue, but no one is absolutely sure, he says.

"We do not believe graduate training schemes will be made illegal by the act. And when marketing such schemes there is an inference that as long as do not exclude applications you will be OK," he explains. "But this is a crucial point and we need to be much clearer."

Employers need a lot of answers right now, because work experience and internship recruitment programmes for next summer and 2007 are already being planned, he adds.

"It would be a tragedy if employers ran for cover and we saw a reduction in the number of graduate schemes. What we need in this country is more not fewer," he argues.

What we are likely to see come next October is much the same as we see with any new law, suggests Graduate Prospects' Ingham: a large section of responsible (and normally larger) employers who will already have taken action and be ready, another group scrambling to get there and a final bunch who not have taken any steps yet.

"They will be unlikely to change until someone takes them to court. But hopefully by that time there will be enough different models in place so that it will not be too difficult for them," she says.

Yet the laws may also bring a surprising benefit to employers. The number of older, mature students going to university increased by a fifth between 1999 and 2003 and is one of the fastest growing sections of the university population.

By making graduate training schemes, and graduate recruitment in general, more open and accessible, businesses may well find they end up bringing a wider range of talented, older people into their organisation, which, with an ageing working population, is probably be no bad thing.

Organisations could then evolve their graduate training and development programmes into an extra arm of their existing diversity programmes, suggests Ingham.

"There will be a small number of employers who inevitably will be at the vanguard of this and they will suddenly become very attractive to new graduates," she advises.

Author: Nic Paton