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When asked for their personal career predictions well over half said that they expected to find work in their chosen profession and

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When asked for their personal career predictions, well over half said that they "expected to find work in their chosen profession" and that they expected "to stay with their first employer for two or three years". They feel as if they've been sacked."As Gryzb says, short-term contracts are a fact of modern working life. A fact of which, according to surveys, students are well aware. In a 1997 poll by Reed Personnel, 81 per cent of 12,000 final-year students saw job security as "a thing of the past", citing "extreme competition from a huge number of graduates" and "work experience being more important than a degree" as the two main problems facing them.While these findings show that, in theory, students are pretty clued- up about the insecurities of the job market, further questioning revealed several anomalies in their ideas. "These are the Nineties, but people think with an Eighties attitude. It's a fact that many employers exploit the fresh minds of graduates; they use them up and then get the next lot in. This means that there is definitely no such thing as a job for life any more, yet graduates go into short-term contracts expecting to be kept on at the end.

When that doesn't happen, it's a real slap in the face and their self-confidence just goes. When not kept on at the end of a contract, people will often experience a period of motivation-sapping self-doubt that can drastically affect their chances of finding another job quickly.Everyone knows that being told you're not needed at work any more and getting sacked are miserable events that often leave you with no money, no future prospects and a serious ego dent. The feelings experienced when a short-term contract comes to an end are less well documented or understood, yet in cases such as Tyler's they are as joyless and damaging as being sacked in the traditional sense.Jo-Ellen Gryzb, director of the career consultancy The Impact Factory, has a theory about why people react so badly when they find out that short term does mean just that. "Initially I felt under-appreciated, but then I started to worry about what I'd done wrong It was a horrible time. It took about three months before I even applied for anything else." The drop in self-esteem and lack of motivation experienced by Tyler when his contract came to an end are not unusual.

He worked long hours and tried hard, but as his contract drew to a close Tyler began to realise that he wasn't going to be kept on. "It felt really weird: my last Friday came to an end and the boss just said, `Thanks for all your work; good luck with your future,'" recalls Tyler. WHEN DANNY Tyler, now aged 25, left university in 1995, he landed a six-month contract with a multi-media company. This was his first proper job and he was anxious to do well, in the hope that the company would find a permanent place for him.

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