It's the start of the long vacation and everyone is milling around figuring out how to get their child a summer job. In my London patch openings are jealously guarded: mothers feign innocence when it turns out they have stitched up their teen's summer with a - well-paid - stint in a computing company topped off by "just a few weeks teaching drama at Camp America".
With three graduates chasing every graduate-level job, it's no longer enough to have a good degree. A glittering CV needs a string of enviable holiday placements too. As the career wars hot up, a rash of companies and consultants is offering to give rich, privileged teens and graduates the edge - albeit at a price. But is a bit of work experience worth paying £5,000 for?
Heather McGregor is a former investment banker turned headhunter whose 17-year-old son's CV already boasts the kind of summer jobs that could propel him into the journalism position he covets.
Robert has done stints at CNN, The Guardian and the Financial Times. But his mother, who also writes the Mrs Moneypenny column in the Financial Times, says she so loathed the wheedling she had to do to land them - not to mention the requests she herself gets to provide holiday jobs - that she is launching a company to offer "a taste of the workplace" to children of the "rich and privileged".
She won't be begging work placements for her youngest two children, she says. Instead they'll do work experience at GraduateJobsNetwork, her new business. "I had to beg all Robert's work experience. And I didn't enjoy it. I wouldn't do it again," she says. "The other two can come through my programme and I'll write a cheque for five grand for each of them."
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That is the price, excluding Vat, she is charging 60 18 to 25-year-olds to spend 10 weeks producing a graduate careers magazine and website from a central London office, with careers advice and skills training thrown in.
"Plus," says McGregor, "the child will have to agree to work office hours and sign a contract to that effect." It goes without saying they won't get paid a penny for their efforts.
She got the idea from a visit to the Edinburgh Festival where she discovered a listing magazine partly written by students who queue up for the unpaid jobs.
"I am sick and tired," says McGregor, "of people sending round their children to be helped with getting onto the job ladder, being given careers counselling when they don't know what they want to do or - horror of horrors - asking for 'work experience'. I have lost count of the number of children I have helped where the parents could well afford to pay."
Her service, she claims, could be compared to "coaching your child for Oxbridge: this is coaching them for getting a job".
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McGregor breakfasts regularly with Ffion Hague, wife of the former leader of the Tory party, whose nephew has already had some preparation for the jobs market. He attended a pilot group course run by Patricia Broke, who launched her service four years ago.
"It is very competitive out there. At the moment they are like lambs to the slaughter," says Broke, who charges "less than £200" a day for her mostly one-to-one service.
Some of her clients "have come away with third class degrees. Some may need to get an extra qualification. I am trying to teach them how to sell themselves. These children have had good educations and are bright. They come from probably the top 20 universities. Mostly, it's a question of gaining confidence".
The jobs they are seeking, she says, include posts in marketing, journalism and publishing, the City and commercial property.
But are such services really neces-sary? Catherine Jones, 26, who graduated from one of Britain's top universities three years ago with a degree in English literature, landed a media job without paying out for extra help. Even so, she thinks these courses will be inundated with graduates.
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Jones (not her real name) confirms that it's virtually impossible to walk straight into a "creative" job after university: "You have to have work experience first for careers in politics, the media, publishing or PR and getting it is competitive, even though the placements are unpaid," she says.
When Jones left university it took her six months to land an unpaid internship at a London PR company, with help from her well-placed sister. But she had to start another stint of work experience before she was eventually offered a proper job at the new media company she is still with.
Similarly, it was his own daughter's experience of job-hunting that inspired former investment banker Nicholas Bedford to start Future Prospect, which promises to help graduates into the right career, partly by acquiring and highlighting the skills employers complain are lacking.
"When Olivia was at university she went to work in the vacations for a company in the US selling educational books," he says. "They sent her to sales school in Nashville where nothing was left to chance: when to turn your body, when to lock eyes to clinch a deal. When she came back I sent her to someone to polish her CV and he told her to forget her degree in sociology - rather she should focus her CV on her sales time in the US and the skills it had taught her.
"She honed her experience into a good dinner party story and all eight companies she applied to offered her a job. When she told me this I thought it's got to be worthwhile trying to explore this as a business."
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Working with Bedford is Edward Gould, former master of Marlborough College, one of Britain's top private schools. For £4,000 the company will pick undergraduates up at the start of their degree and counsel them all the way through, making sure they start to think early about career choices and what they need to do to secure them.
"The really bright, well organised students will continue to press on through life but there are quite a few who need help," says Gould.