What's the state of the jobs market for graduates at the moment? There are lots of gloomy headlines about a lack of jobs and the alarming lengths graduates seem to have to go to in order to find work, but we don't often see much hard data.
That changes each year in November when HECSU and the Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services publish What Do Graduates Do?, based on the annual Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education (DLHE) survey. Designed for young people and those advising them, the guide illustrates the options available for any of the 26 degree areas – the most popular main subjects at university level – by showing what last year's graduates from those degrees actually did six months after leaving university.
The first and most important point the guide makes is that most graduates get jobs of some kind pretty soon after leaving university. By six months 70% of last year's graduates were in work. 2% of those in work were not being paid, and 2% were working overseas. The next largest group were those in further study – 13% (including 2% taking postgraduate teacher training), with master's study the most common option. 8.5% were unemployed, down from the figure for 2009 graduates.
Some of you may remember a story from January, based on data released by the Statistics Office that unemployment for new graduates was running at 20%. This was based on analysis of Labour Force Survey data from the third quarter of 2010. Because of the timing of their survey, what the Stats Office had essentially done was made an estimate of what proportion of new graduates didn't have a job on leaving university. This rather changes the focus from "Oh no, 20% of graduates are unemployed" to "Blimey, 80% of last year's graduates had something sorted by the end of summer", which, for someone like me who graduated into the last recession fills me with admiration for the resourcefulness of modern graduates.
Of course this also means that in the time between the Labour Force Survey analysis in the summer, and the DLHE survey at the start of 2011, the unemployment rate for last year's graduates dropped from around 20% to 8.5%. Over half the graduates unemployed in the summer had a job by winter, even with the economy in the condition it was in – in the last quarter of 2010, GDP fell by 0.5% and, as yet, we've seen no such downturn in 2011.
Now, of course, there are a whole group of points to be made. For a start, the unemployment rate for graduates is too high. Out of recession, it would normally run at between 5% and 7% after six months. The individual experiences of recession, the struggle to find any work at all, are likely to be dispiriting and unpleasant.
And then there's the thorny question of what sort of jobs they actually got. Well, this news is also mixed. Most graduates who got jobs got what are considered graduate level. But, after six months, 38% were in jobs that were not graduate level, with bar work the most common non-graduate job.
Nevertheless, the jobs market for graduates at the start of the year would best be described as "not great, but not hopeless". There was robust recruitment in financial services and banking, but also recovering quite well were PR, marketing and some areas of the arts. Many areas of the public sector were not as healthy and nor, worryingly, were the sciences. Engineering, which had suffered a real clobbering during the recession, was recovering, albeit slowly.
So what's the position now? Hard to say. In the summer, employers were cautiously optimistic and the likelihood was that this year's graduates would see a similar jobs market to last year. Since then, the Eurozone issues have made an already-uncertain jobs market even less certain, and we have seen a lot of public sector job losses – which affect graduates particularly - without private sector jobs creation to balance. So, as things stand, it's likely that there will be some jobs available for graduates, but a bit more concentrated in London, and in really short supply in things like the media, sciences and the unspecialised public sector.
But still, by Christmas, most of this year's graduates will have jobs, and most of those with jobs will be getting paid and be in graduate level employment. Many will not, and we all need to help them as much as we can. Good luck to all of you.
Charlie Ball is deputy research director at the Higher Education Careers Services Unit.
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