What is undertaking a training contract during a recession like?

In light of today's announcement and warning by the BoE, interested to hear experiences from the last recession post-2008, and how it affected workload and retention prospects...

The tc was fine as they can’t get rid of you (although you might be sent on secondment if the dept you are in ceases to exist). The tricky bit comes when you qualify…

I sincerely hope it won’t be anything like as bad as 2008-11 for NQs

Out of interest (and fear the same might happen now), how much did trainee retention drop? Hoping that as I'm starting TC next month that it'll mostly improve by 2024...

Fine by 24.

It was great for me. I was cheap and had a permanent contract (nobody makes trainees redundant really). I was on the golf course by 3pm most days and gym/swim before arriving at 10am.

It was however very very boring!

 

Recall mine being super busy as they binned off all the mid level associates so there was loads of work for us to do.  Retention was fine for our intake as a result.

I did a lot of security reviews and a lot of amend and pretends. I qualified in 2012 and it was a bit brutal, ngl. People were talking about green shoots for years before they came. 

Still, we got through. 

firstly it’s hard to call how a recession will hit the city

this isn’t a liquidity crunch - look at latest bank numbers - institutions have loads of cash

riskier and highly levered deal work may slow but borrowers who are viable will be able to get refi’d - v different to 2008

we actualky haven’t had a proper, real economy  recession since 1992

This is nothing like the GFC. Just a standard 1-2 year dip where they will just not take as many trainees and drop retention and then bitch about lack of decent mid-levels in 5 years. 

The reason they are having to pay mega for useless NQs at the moment is they hollowed out qualifier supply post GFC and this is the first boom where a surplus of 3-7 PQE would have been mighty handy, but instead Gimplord, Fister & Spunk have to scrabble to pull trainees away from places with semi-decent training so they can cut & paste prior deals 24/7. 

I graduated in 1982 into the worst unemployed (much worse than now) in FIFTY years as at 1982. 3 m were out of work. My trainee pay in London was £6250 a year (about £20k in today's money ie half what trainees get now). It was fine. The economy goes up and down over the decades. I think trainees tend to do okay once they have a training contract as it is hard to sack them so at least they have 2 years of security.

That wasn’t the question. 
 

Fair to say that during recessions trainees are more worried about being offered a job on qualification and tend to get their heads down and work harder. I saw about four economic cycles during my career and that always happened 

Yep, that's my thinking. Historically, the firm I'm joining has a very good retention rate (partially because it has a small intake), but am thinking that I may have to work harder (and longer) to be confident of being retained.