I saw today that the legal case brought against Lord Sugar by a winning Apprentice contestant (who by winning the television show was entitled to a well-paid job at Lord Sugar's company) has failed. Lord Sugar has been quite acerbic about it, saying that she is a liar and an opportunist who thought that she could blackmail him for money.

That is clearly what the court, on the whole, thought, although I was surprised to read that his witness evidence included a statement that he'd found her paranoid and suspicious. These two important qualities of people who are familiar with the world seem to me to have no bearing on the truth of the case at hand. This is character assassination and it's sad that it seems, from the news report, to be an important part of the legal system.

However, when we move away from the disputed facts of this one case we'll see that her position is very common. She has argued that she was recruited for a highly-paid job that required a skilled candidate and gave important responsibilities, but that she was instead a grossly overpaid secretary, doing menial labour when she had work to do at all.

This is what any suspicious person would have deduced of a job that was the prize of a gimmicky television show rather than a geniune opening with serious recruitment, but since the court case is over I can't demolish Lord Sugar's argument.
However, I do think that the same general situation applies to many jobs. My own job was preceded by a long recruitment process involving online application, online testing, two assessment days and a number of written tests. After this supposedly stringent selection process the intake of trainees was given secretarial work to do for months until the busy period of the year. For example, someone was asked to shred thousands of pages of documents, which, given the shredder's capacity for only a few pages at a time, took a few hours.

We were told that we were selected for a difficult training scheme, but the initial training was for multiple-choice assessments of rote memory. I will agree that learning stuff by rote is difficult, but I don't think it requires any great talent, as assessed during recruitment.
The training involved some maths, and we were taken over simple calculations that are taught before GCSE (e.g extrapolation and interpolation) as if they were works of genius rather than something any adult could deduce without any training at all.
I wrote at length about the more word-driven parts of the training, and how we were fed 'facts' without being allowed to question them, and required to reproduce them without comment; we were expected to regurgitate definitions in essays even when we had not only used the definition earlier in an exam, but obviously understood it through the context of what came next. Tools were actually lists of things to consider that common sense would make anyone think about, and we were expected to recite these tools (and their names) in preference over making insightful points about the situation being assessed. There's plenty more to write about it, but not here.

Outside of training, we are asked to collect data. We do Google searches and note what we find, and someone senior will do the analysis. I am, at the moment, collecting telephone numbers from websites. A senior analyst will do the data processing we want done; I will be sent off to collect more.

I heard a friend in consultancy say something similar; her work involves following checklists of things to do with the client and some basic knowledge of Microsoft Excel.

I am sure that many people find this, and there's certainly a problem. I would tend to say that we're not being given good enough jobs; that promotion is too slow, but there are other answers. If I, and presumably most of the other trainees in my job, were given training about the job, including doing the job, we would be able to be senior colleagues in half the time.
It rankles to see old men running everything when the expertise needed to run things differs from that (if any) required for the job, and can be quickly acquired. Waiting for 20 years until I'm old enough to have a go at a high-paying, responsible job looks like a form of indentured servitude that people usually condemn.

On the other hand, it could be that the experience of those years really is vital, and the intelligence and aptitude that we've been tested for is actually not important. In this case it seems a bit silly to waste our time on assessments, or even on university education itself (ignoring personal benefits, such as friendships or culture). Since we're supposed to be drones who don't think about how we'd do things ourselves, or question the opinions we're being taught as facts, why bother with a university education that, for the purposes of most graduate recruitment, is good only for transferable skills such as thought and insight?
Given that even people who study business at university get the same treatment as those with merely transferable skills, it doesn't look like this is the answer, although it could be that business studies is such a soft subject that its relevance is balanced by the general quality of the education or candidates.

I'm not sure which answer is correct, but I don't see that it can be neither. Either the complex selection of new graduates is necessary because their rapid learning will make them better workers, faster, in which case they need the opportunity to learn; or there's no need to provide rapid advancement for them because rapid learning won't be good enough: the experience of dealing with multiple situations is the only thing that counts.

At the moment I am, barring the occasional piece of work that goes unnoticed because I solve the problem so quickly, an overpaid secretarial worker. I don't understand how this suits anyone. Because I am doing simple work, I am not getting the training or experience I want. Because I am overpaid for the work I am doing my employer is not getting the efficiency it wants.

I do understand that all work, even at the highest levels, involves a certain amount of relatively unskilled work. No CEO can avoid walking the corridors to meetings, because they do not miraculously appear around him. Everyone must check e-mails and write responses, often relaying information that has already been decided.
However, I'm not going to get the experience I need to get better jobs by doing admin. work for other people. If others do analysis whilst I do data collection for them, how can I get experience of doing analysis (although I have plenty already, as it happens)?

This leads me on to wider questions. Is the population now over-educated for the work our economy gives us? Are we merely vastly inappropriately educated?
The indentured aspect of things enhances inequality; every difficulty anyone faces from a background with no support is a diffculty that someone with a good background can avoid. A rich person who jumps a few levels of the hierarchy by joining Daddy's company escapes the indentured servitude that anyone without such oppotunities seems to need to go through. Once this is accomplished, inevitably that person is more experienced at the best jobs, and no matter how much harder and better-paying jobs overall become, the top jobs will always be occupied by those who had a short-cut to avoid the long way round.
If we want true social mobility in a society which gives people from all backgrounds all opportunities and allows the best performers to get the top jobs, then we need to avoid big hurdles to promotion that the privileged will never experience. We can't artificially create hurdles for rich people only, which would be inefficient even if we could; we need to remove the barriers that affect everyone else.
A major barrier is any sort of investment of time. This applies to generic graduate recruitment jobs as well as research careers. A PhD is not vocational training: it is a price to pay in order to have a chance at a career in academia or other research. What training one does get from a PhD could easily  be completed in 6 months if it were distilled down to the training only.

It might be considered greedy of me to want better opportunities to get to positions of responsibility which are well-remunerated. But I think that one of the reasons these posts are so overpaid is the false belief that the people in them are rare and extraordinary people who are not easily replaced. If this is partly because of poor opportunities below them (and partly just hero-worship and good networking/PR) then the lack of supply is entirely correctable.
If we get more people wanting the top jobs and able to do them then wages will inevitably fall, and accountability will increase. If by running a company into the ground you render yourself unemployable because employers can trust plenty of new applicants for the role of running a company, you'll be less likely to do so and get away with it.

So if we were to make promotion faster, we'd pay less money and get better performance. We could even pay less money to the secretarial workers not in training. What's not to like?