The Grad Job Market in UK – Not fully recovered despite drop in unemployment

The recent annual Destination of Leavers of Higher Education survey confirmed that graduates who left university last summer entered a rather better jobs market than their peers from the year before.

As the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) shows with this chart, the overall employment rate for UK and EU graduates from a full-time first degree after six months was up from 68.5% last year to 70.7% this year, and unemployment after six months was down from 9.1% to 7.8%.

There’s a recovery on. Some of it will be the result of better job conditions, some of it will be the result of resourceful students making the best of their chances, some of it will be down to the hard work of institutions and careers and employability services. But things are getting better.

This recovery doesn’t yet cover the whole country. Like the recovery in general, it seems to be happening more in London and the South East, although other cities, most notably Manchester, also seem to have seen improvement. If you’re in a smaller town, or in parts of the country where an upturn in the jobs market is a little more sluggish, you may well not have seen much of a graduate jobs recovery so far. When – or if – the recovery reaches those areas, we will see further improvement.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at Unemployment has dropped but the grad job market has not fully recovered | Guardian Careers | Guardian Professional.

Details

The table below shows the figures on which the graphic is based. The survey was changed in 2011/12 to capture more details of leavers activities. An equivalent table for 2011/12 leavers can be found in Press Release 194. When comparing the two press releases, the proportion of full-time first degree leavers in work has risen while the proportion unemployed and in further study has fallen.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at Destinations of full-time first degree graduates – HESA – Higher Education Statistics Agency.