Britain's graduates ‘left on the scrapheap' as entry-level jobs disappear
Caoilen Doyle will graduate from his master's in biomedical engineering at the University of Strathclyde on Friday, but is struggling to find full-time employment in his field.
Doyle, 27 from Motherwell, near Glasgow, has applied to more than 40 engineering roles and attended three assessment centres but still hasn't managed to secure a job. For now, he will have to satisfy himself with his part-time work as a swimming instructor.
'There's a lot more networking needed if you don't know somebody already in the industry,' says Doyle, who has spent seven years in higher education.
It will be a familiar story to many university leavers. After submitting essays, handing in assignments and completing exams, graduates now face an even more challenging task: finding a job.
Graduate job postings in the 12 months to June are down 33pc compared to a year earlier, according to Indeed.
Not only are there fewer jobs on offer but there are also more university leavers. The numbers have climbed from 828,000 in the 2018/19 academic year to just over 1m in 2023/24 (including both postgraduate and undergraduate students).
As a result, graduates are having to scrap it out over fewer jobs. Each entry-level role received 140 applications on average in 2024, according to the Institute of Student Employers, up from 86 applications per role in 2023.
The struggles of well-educated people to find work is part of the growing problem of worklessness in Britain. According to figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), 987,000 people aged 16 to 24 were classed as not in education, employment or training (Neet) in January to March 2025.
'The situation for young people is ... a worry for me at the moment,' Alison McGovern, the employment minister, told the Work and Pensions Committee earlier this month.
'Nearly 1m young people [are] effectively on the scrapheap.'
Rise of the robots
While studying for her master's degree in social and geographic data science at UCL, it dawned on Hannah Schuller, 24, that finding her first job would be a struggle.
'It was during that year that I realised a job would by no means be as easy to get as I thought it had been maybe three years prior when I started higher education,' says Schuller, who graduated in September 2024 with a distinction.
Schuller has applied to roles ranging from data handling and analysis to data journalism. She has found herself waiting months for a reply and, like many others, is struggling to navigate a new world where artificial intelligence (AI) is often the first thing that reads her submission.
'I don't really care if an AI tool is going through the applications,' Schuller says. 'I think the bigger problem that it reflects is that there's not enough opportunities out there and that there are too many people in the first place applying for too few things.'
As well as transforming hiring, AI is also fuelling drops in job openings within industries where tasks can be automated. It may help to explain a 62pc drop in graduate roles in HR over the last year and a 44pc slump in entry-level jobs in accounting.
'Big four' accountants KPMG, Deloitte, PwC and EY are hiring hundreds fewer grads than they were a few years ago as they use AI to complete the kind of 'grunt' work that would typically be done by junior staff.
Many businesses have also put a freeze on hiring or are cutting back jobs following Rachel Reeves's tax raid in the autumn Budget, which increased the cost of employing staff by raising employers' National Insurance contributions.
Meanwhile, Stephen Isherwood, of the Institute of Student Employers, says declines in industries such as technology reflected the fact 'they over recruited significantly after the pandemic and there's still a retrenchment from that'.
'Really, really disheartening'
It's not just grads feeling the squeeze. The latest figures from Indeed show that vacancies across all levels of seniority and industry are now at the lowest level since the pandemic.
A cooling labour market has meant that some graduates find themselves competing against more experienced jobseekers who have been forced to apply for junior or entry-level roles in an effort to find work.
Many university leavers find themselves in a catch-22 as they are unable to get the experience they need to compete against these kinds of candidates.
'In all likelihood it's unfortunately probably going to remain quite a challenging picture for graduates for the foreseeable,' says Jack Kennedy, at Indeed.
Simran Abdullatif graduated with a first-class degree in Criminology and Sociology from the University of Kent last year. Since then, the 23-year-old has found the job search 'really, really disheartening'.
'Once I started looking seriously, there was nothing. Honestly, there was nothing,' she says.
The aspiring solicitor has cast her net wide in her search for an entry-level role. After sending out over 100 job applications for vacancies ranging from law schemes to secretarial roles, Ms Abdullatif hasn't been invited for a single interview.
'I've come to realise how tough just finding a job is. I've honestly even been applying to Tesco, Morrisons, Lidl and even they aren't getting back to me,' she says.
'I keep saying to my mum: 'what was the point of me studying so hard to get a first-class for that first-class to not even be able to do anything for me?' You've studied for so long and you don't see the fruits of your labour.
'Maybe I need to get more experience under my belt, but then no one wants to give you the experience.'
Doyle is similarly struggling to know where to go from here. Despite all the applications and assessment days, he has had little in the way of constructive criticism about how to improve his changes.
'I think I've only had proper feedback from one of them, but even for the rejection emails that I get, it just sounds like, 'oh, we've decided to go with other candidates progressing forward',' he says.
'So there's not really much you can build on.'
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