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The Guardian
14-07-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
‘I've £90k in student debt – for what?' Graduates share their job-hunting woes amid the AI fallout
Susie, from Sheffield, was unemployed for nine months after she graduated with a PhD last year, despite having applied to more than 700 jobs. 'I assumed it wouldn't be too hard to find a job [with three higher education qualifications],' she said. 'However, I often spent a whole day applying for a job, tailoring my CV and cover letter, only to be rejected two minutes later with a comment saying my documents had been 'carefully reviewed'. About 70% of jobs I didn't hear back from at all, including some I had attended multiple rounds of interviews for.' AI, Susie felt, had changed the graduate jobs landscape she experienced in one way in particular. 'Thousands of people are applying to the same jobs now – on LinkedIn you can see the number of people who have pressed apply and often one hour after a job is posted hundreds of people have already [applied].' In the end, Susie was offered a position paying under £30k, 'which isn't that much more than a PhD stipend after paying tax'. Her struggles in securing her first graduate role will be familiar to hundreds of thousands of young people in the UK who have been navigating one of the toughest labour markets in recent history. As employers pause hiring and use AI to cut costs, the number of entry-level jobs has reduced sharply since the advent of ChatGPT. As large graduate cohorts apply for increasingly scarce early career positions, the heavy use of AI in the recruitment process itself has made the job hunt nightmarish and Kafkaesque for university leavers across the country. Martyna, a 23-year-old who will receive a master's degree in English literature from the University of York this autumn, was among other graduate jobseekers who got in touch with the Guardian via a callout and has been searching for her first full-time job since the beginning of May. 'I've applied to about 150 entry-level jobs – in marketing, publishing, the civil service, charities, but also for retail and hospitality positions,' she said. 'So far I've had five interviews, many almost instant rejections, plus ghosting. It makes me want to scream. 'Platforms use AI to search for key words. I have friends who have copied entire job descriptions, pasted them into the Word document, reduced the font, and turned the colour to white so AIs find the words they're looking for. It feels dystopian.' One of the few responses she has received so far was a rejection email explaining that 2,000 other people had applied for the role. 'I feel very disheartened and, frankly, lied to,' Martyna said. 'Both of my degrees seem useless. My parents came here from Poland, and I have £90,000 in student debt – for what? 'They told us: 'If you don't go to university, you could be working in McDonald's.' I went to university and applied to be a barista, and was rejected for lack of experience. I have considered going back to Poland.' Various people who shared their frustrations said that, across a variety of sectors, job-specific experience, especially in customer-facing roles, was now valued a lot more by employers than an impressive degree. 'Jobs don't care if you have a degree,' said Lucy, a 24-year-old from Lincolnshire who has been working part-time in support roles and at [the bakery chain] Greggs since graduating in 2022. 'I have a degree in visual communication and can't get hired in the design industry, but my experience working in a college means I pretty much always get interviews for education-related roles. I'm frustrated that I essentially got a degree because I was told it was the only good option and now I'm finding that I would have been better off entering the workforce straight out of college.' Lucy has just accepted a new full-time role on minimum wage in the residential care sector. 'It's the best I could get,' she said. Willemien Schurer, 53, a mother from London whose two sons have recently graduated, was among a number of respondents who explained that jobseekers felt entirely unable to stand out, knowing that hundreds if not thousands of other applicants had almost identical CVs, and had likely produced very similar cover letters with the help of AI. '[I've read in the news] that recruiters are bemoaning that so many applications fit the bill so precisely that they don't know how to filter them,' Schurer said. 'If everyone ticks all the boxes, then how to discern whom to pick? Grade inflation [at school and university] has now followed people into the job market.' Her older son, she said, had spent a 'soul-destroying' five months applying for about 200 jobs unsuccessfully after he graduated with a maths degree from a top university. AI recruitment processes that make it nigh impossible for candidates to distinguish themselves from competitors without being screened out, Schurer felt, have placed an additional premium on personal connections. 'It appears that it's back to who you know rather than what you know, and a whole load of luck,' she said, reflecting the concerns of various respondents. 'AI-generated resumes screened by AI HR software means [one's success] is so much more dependent on networks and who you know,' agreed a business school professor from Sweden who wanted to stay anonymous. 'But gen Z know fewer people in real life and depend on digital connections, which is not optimal.' The job market his students were graduating into was 'tough, and about to get tougher', he predicted. 'While companies are using AI to reduce costs, students are using it for all uni work and to replace thinking, and are subsequently de-optimising themselves for future jobs.' This sentiment was echoed by dozens of university lecturers from the UK and elsewhere, with many expressing grave concerns about the impact of AI on the university experience, warning that students were graduating without having acquired skills and knowledge they would have in the past because they were using AI to complete most coursework. 'Being able to write well and think coherently were basic requirements in most graduate jobs 10, 15 years ago,' said a senior recruitment professional at a large consultancy firm from London, speaking anonymously. 'Now, they are emerging as basically elite skills. Almost nobody can do it. We see all the time that people with top degrees cannot summarise the contents of a document, cannot problem solve. 'Coupled with what AI can offer now, there are few reasons left to hire graduates for many positions, which is reflected in recent [labour market] reports.' Various employers and professionals in HR and management positions shared that university leavers they encountered often struggled to speak on the phone or in meetings, take notes with a pen, relay messages precisely or complete written tasks without internet access. 'What people want to do and what they're actually good at are simply often two very different things, and it feels as if schools and universities could be doing a much better job at communicating this,' said Tom, the CEO of an e-commerce logistics company in the south-east of England. 'But sadly, universities are now run like businesses. They sell dreams and young people buy them, and then often, when they re-emerge into the real world, it becomes a nightmare.' Sanjay Balle, 26, from London, graduated from the Open University with a third-class PPE degree last summer and has been earning £700-£800 a month as a waiter on a zero-hours contract since. 'I've been applying for about 20 entry-level and graduate roles a day and have racked up well over 500 applications – in advertising, healthcare, procurement, education, financial services and the civil service,' he said. Given the AI revolution in the job market, helping employers cut costs and improve productivity, Balle suggested it was 'no-brainer' that there are now fewer entry-level roles, and while people might look to the government to incentivise hiring, the huge cost made such an intervention unlikely. 'I think we need to encourage young people to explore other options apart from university, to pursue vocational paths and go into trades, but we also need to help university graduates like me. Otherwise, more and more graduates that are overqualified for their part-time jobs [will experience] a lack of social interaction and mental health issues.' While most graduate jobseekers who got in touch were desperate to secure any full-time job, several expressed profound disappointment about the creeping realisation that they may struggle finding work in their chosen speciality. 'My biggest fear is never being able to get into the field I want to be in,' said Louise, 24, who graduated from the University of Oxford with a master's in microbiology last year and applied to hundreds of jobs while working part-time at John Lewis before she was recently offered a graduate trainee position. 'There are very few jobs available for graduates, and entry-level jobs appear to be increasingly hiring experienced employees who also apply, making them less entry-level,' she said. The employer that hired her, Louise added, had been more interested in whether she had customer service skills acquired in hospitality jobs than in her scientific work experience and qualifications. 'The job I've been offered is not using the skills I have,' she said. 'I just want to use my degree.'
The Guardian
13-07-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
‘I've £90k in student debt – for what?' Graduates share their job-hunting woes amid the AI fallout
Susie, from Sheffield, was unemployed for nine months after she graduated with a PhD last year, despite having applied to more than 700 jobs. 'I assumed it wouldn't be too hard to find a job [with three higher education qualifications],' she said. 'However, I often spent a whole day applying for a job, tailoring my CV and cover letter, only to be rejected two minutes later with a comment saying my documents had been 'carefully reviewed'. About 70% of jobs I didn't hear back from at all, including some I had attended multiple rounds of interviews for.' AI, Susie felt, had changed the graduate jobs landscape she experienced in one way in particular. 'Thousands of people are applying to the same jobs now – on LinkedIn you can see the number of people who have pressed apply and often one hour after a job is posted hundreds of people have already [applied].' In the end, Susie was offered a position paying under £30k, 'which isn't that much more than a PhD stipend after paying tax'. Her struggles in securing her first graduate role will be familiar to hundreds of thousands of young people in the UK who have been navigating one of the toughest labour markets in recent history. As employers pause hiring and use AI to cut costs, the number of entry-level jobs has reduced sharply since the advent of ChatGPT. As large graduate cohorts apply for increasingly scarce early career positions, the heavy use of AI in the recruitment process itself has made the job hunt nightmarish and Kafkaesque for university leavers across the country. Martyna, a 23-year-old who will receive a master's degree in English literature from the University of York this autumn, was among other graduate jobseekers who got in touch with the Guardian via a callout and has been searching for her first full-time job since the beginning of May. 'I've applied to about 150 entry-level jobs – in marketing, publishing, the civil service, charities, but also for retail and hospitality positions,' she said. 'So far I've had five interviews, many almost instant rejections, plus ghosting. It makes me want to scream. 'Platforms use AI to search for key words. I have friends who have copied entire job descriptions, pasted them into the Word document, reduced the font, and turned the colour to white so AIs find the words they're looking for. It feels dystopian.' One of the few responses she has received so far was a rejection email explaining that 2,000 other people had applied for the role. 'I feel very disheartened and, frankly, lied to,' Martyna said. 'Both of my degrees seem useless. My parents came here from Poland, and I have £90,000 in student debt – for what? 'They told us: 'If you don't go to university, you could be working in McDonald's.' I went to university and applied to be a barista, and was rejected for lack of experience. I have considered going back to Poland.' Various people who shared their frustrations said that, across a variety of sectors, job-specific experience, especially in customer-facing roles, was now valued a lot more by employers than an impressive degree. 'Jobs don't care if you have a degree,' said Lucy, a 24-year-old from Lincolnshire who has been working part-time in support roles and at [the bakery chain] Greggs since graduating in 2022. 'I have a degree in visual communication and can't get hired in the design industry, but my experience working in a college means I pretty much always get interviews for education-related roles. I'm frustrated that I essentially got a degree because I was told it was the only good option and now I'm finding that I would have been better off entering the workforce straight out of college.' Lucy has just accepted a new full-time role on minimum wage in the residential care sector. 'It's the best I could get,' she said. Willemien Schurer, 53, a mother from London whose two sons have recently graduated, was among a number of respondents who explained that jobseekers felt entirely unable to stand out, knowing that hundreds if not thousands of other applicants had almost identical CVs, and had likely produced very similar cover letters with the help of AI. '[I've read in the news] that recruiters are bemoaning that so many applications fit the bill so precisely that they don't know how to filter them,' Schurer said. 'If everyone ticks all the boxes, then how to discern whom to pick? Grade inflation [at school and university] has now followed people into the job market.' Her older son, she said, had spent a 'soul-destroying' five months applying for about 200 jobs unsuccessfully after he graduated with a maths degree from a top university. AI recruitment processes that make it nigh impossible for candidates to distinguish themselves from competitors without being screened out, Schurer felt, have placed an additional premium on personal connections. 'It appears that it's back to who you know rather than what you know, and a whole load of luck,' she said, reflecting the concerns of various respondents. 'AI-generated resumes screened by AI HR software means [one's success] is so much more dependent on networks and who you know,' agreed a business school professor from Sweden who wanted to stay anonymous. 'But gen Z know fewer people in real life and depend on digital connections, which is not optimal.' The job market his students were graduating into was 'tough, and about to get tougher', he predicted. 'While companies are using AI to reduce costs, students are using it for all uni work and to replace thinking, and are subsequently de-optimising themselves for future jobs.' This sentiment was echoed by dozens of university lecturers from the UK and elsewhere, with many expressing grave concerns about the impact of AI on the university experience, warning that students were graduating without having acquired skills and knowledge they would have in the past because they were using AI to complete most coursework. 'Being able to write well and think coherently were basic requirements in most graduate jobs 10, 15 years ago,' said a senior recruitment professional at a large consultancy firm from London, speaking anonymously. 'Now, they are emerging as basically elite skills. Almost nobody can do it. We see all the time that people with top degrees cannot summarise the contents of a document, cannot problem solve. 'Coupled with what AI can offer now, there are few reasons left to hire graduates for many positions, which is reflected in recent [labour market] reports.' Various employers and professionals in HR and management positions shared that university leavers they encountered often struggled to speak on the phone or in meetings, take notes with a pen, relay messages precisely or complete written tasks without internet access. 'What people want to do and what they're actually good at are simply often two very different things, and it feels as if schools and universities could be doing a much better job at communicating this,' said Tom, the CEO of an e-commerce logistics company in the south-east of England. 'But sadly, universities are now run like businesses. They sell dreams and young people buy them, and then often, when they re-emerge into the real world, it becomes a nightmare.' Sanjay Balle, 26, from London, graduated from the Open University with a third-class PPE degree last summer and has been earning £700-£800 a month as a waiter on a zero-hours contract since. 'I've been applying for about 20 entry-level and graduate roles a day and have racked up well over 500 applications – in advertising, healthcare, procurement, education, financial services and the civil service,' he said. Given the AI revolution in the job market, helping employers cut costs and improve productivity, Balle suggested it was 'no-brainer' that there are now fewer entry-level roles, and while people might look to the government to incentivise hiring, the huge cost made such an intervention unlikely. 'I think we need to encourage young people to explore other options apart from university, to pursue vocational paths and go into trades, but we also need to help university graduates like me. Otherwise, more and more graduates that are overqualified for their part-time jobs [will experience] a lack of social interaction and mental health issues.' While most graduate jobseekers who got in touch were desperate to secure any full-time job, several expressed profound disappointment about the creeping realisation that they may struggle finding work in their chosen speciality. 'My biggest fear is never being able to get into the field I want to be in,' said Louise, 24, who graduated from the University of Oxford with a master's in microbiology last year and applied to hundreds of jobs while working part-time at John Lewis before she was recently offered a graduate trainee position. 'There are very few jobs available for graduates, and entry-level jobs appear to be increasingly hiring experienced employees who also apply, making them less entry-level,' she said. The employer that hired her, Louise added, had been more interested in whether she had customer service skills acquired in hospitality jobs than in her scientific work experience and qualifications. 'The job I've been offered is not using the skills I have,' she said. 'I just want to use my degree.'
Times
13-07-2025
- Business
- Times
Robots are taking grad jobs. Do we give up or use our brains?
W hat do you get when you cross an overeducated population with an absence of high-quality jobs? This is, perhaps, the setup to history's least funny joke. But the punchline is important, perhaps world-changingly so. We are about to find out what it is. This year the number of graduate jobs advertised by employers has gone down 33 per cent. AI is to blame, naturally. Robots are doing the grunt work that previously fell to capitalism's least pitied whipping boys: recent history graduates who dream of accountancy qualifications and an annual holiday in Santorini. As a result we can expect to see a bunch of smart, overeducated youngsters wandering about with nothing to do. In a way, this is an acceleration of something that was already happening. According to the most recent figures from the Office for National Statistics I can find, in 2017, 31 per cent of graduates were in jobs for which they were overeducated. We will now look back on them as the lucky ones. AI is about to make the problem so much worse.
The Guardian
09-07-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Intelligent machines are already reshaping careers
Your editorial rightly highlights the challenges facing today's graduates (The Guardian view on the graduate jobs crunch: AI must not be allowed to eclipse young talent, 2 July). But while it casts artificial intelligence as a threat to young talent, it misses a deeper truth: AI isn't just disrupting the job market, it's reshaping it entirely. Unfortunately, the decline in entry-level roles is not a temporary glitch. AI already outperforms most graduate hires in tasks such as summarising, analysing and content creation. As the technology evolves, it will continue to replace higher-skilled mid-level and expert roles in fields such as law, finance, marketing and journalism. AI is cheaper, faster and more scalable than most graduate employees. For-profit companies have little incentive to choose graduates over AI systems unless regulation compels them. None of this means young people are obsolete. But it does mean we need to reimagine the future. Universal basic income, once seen as radical, is becoming a practical response to a world with fewer jobs, where opportunity must be decoupled from employment. The real risk isn't automation. It's inertia. As technology develops at an unprecedented pace, clinging to outdated employment models will only deepen socioeconomic inequality and we will fail the next generation. AI has the potential to liberate us from repetitive labour. But to ensure it benefits everyone we must act now, not just to protect jobs but to redefine what it means to live, contribute and thrive in an age of intelligent WoodfordEmployment support specialist, Cardiff As someone working in the service sector and attempting to retrain using AI tools myself, I see both the promise and peril of this rapid technological shift. The potential of AI to revolutionise industries is undeniable. But the cost must not be borne by a generation already scarred by a pandemic-disrupted education, crushing student debt and, now, shrinking pathways into meaningful careers. Graduates are not just entry-level labourers – they are future innovators, leaders and entrepreneurs. Denying them the chance to learn, grow and gain experience because a machine can draft a memo faster is shortsighted. A generation raised on digital fluency is uniquely placed to enhance, not be replaced by, emerging technologies. We need urgent action, not just rhetoric. That means government incentives for companies to hire and train graduates. It means AI integration that supports rather than supplants human development. It means rethinking what 'entry-level' work should look like in the 2020s and ensuring mentorship, creativity and real responsibility remain part of ColeyTunstall, Staffordshire I am 77 and a retired engineer. I have been using and creating AI GPTs (generative pre-trained transformers) for more than two years. It is a revolution in collaborative thinking and problem solving. Graduates must learn to use it to solve business problems in everything they do. They must learn to use and create their own GPTs to increase productivity and lower costs. Productivity depends on continuously improving processes. AI does this. Learn it. Use it. Those who don't will not have careers. Joseph P Lapinski Gdynia, Poland Have an opinion on anything you've read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
The Guardian
07-07-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
As if graduating weren't daunting enough, now students like me face a jobs market devastated by AI
September is the beginning of many young people's lives, as cars speed along motorways transporting 18- and 19-year-olds to their new university accommodations. I remember my own journey down to Exeter in 2022, the first stage in what I hoped would be an experience to set me up for the rest of my life. Little did I know that this was the calm before the storm, before anyone had heard of ChatGPT, or imagined the chaos that generative AI was about to cause for new graduates. Fast forward to 2025, and some of the young people I began this journey with have realised that they've spent the last three years training for graduate jobs that don't exist. Many firms are now slashing their number of new hires. Big accountancy firms have cut back on graduate recruitment; Deloitte reduced its scheme by 18%, while EY has cut the number of graduates it's recruiting by 11%. According to data collected by the job search site Adzuna, entry-level job opportunities in finance have dropped by 50.8%, and those for IT services have seen a decrease of 54.8%. The main cause of this is artificial intelligence, which is destroying many of the entry-level jobs open to recent graduates. Companies are now relying on AI to replicate junior-level tasks, removing the need for them to hire humans. It feels like a kick in the teeth to students and recent graduates, who were already entering a challenging labour market. Once, graduates who had toiled through multiple rounds of interviews, battled it out with other applicants at an assessment centre, and made it through to the final round, could hope to get a job in a sector such as consultancy or accountancy. These historically secure, solid and (some would say) boring options guaranteed you gainful and well-paid employment and a clear career path. Now, those secure opportunities feel as though they're evaporating. Since applicants can't see jobs that no longer exist, their experience of this intense competition for fewer jobs is often limited to a series of disappointments and rejections. Should a student or recent graduate apply for one of these elusive opportunities, their application will frequently be evaluated and often declined by an AI system before a human even reads it. Friends who have recently graduated tell me of the emotional toll of talking to their webcam during an AI-generated interview in the hope that the system judges in their favour, a process that can be repeated again and again. So far, creative fields, and those that involve real-life human contact, seem more impervious to this trend. It will probably be a period of time before doctors or nurses, or professions that rely on genuine creativity such as painters or performing artists, find themselves replaced with an AI model. Even so, if people become increasingly unable to spot AI, and businesses continue to embrace it, the risk is that professions such as art and illustration also get devalued over time, and replaced by a bleak, AI-generated cocktail of eerily familiar 'creative' work. Conservative politicians and the rightwing press have often suggested that the most valuable degrees are those that have a clear job at the end of them (and that those in more creative fields, such as the humanities, are by implication less valuable). As one Times columnist wrote recently, students who do 'less practical' degrees are more likely to be 'living at home, working on their script/novel/music/art portfolio while earning pocket money', without either a profession or a useful skill. But what use is a degree in accountancy if you can't then get an accounting job at the end of it? Why is this course more valuable than studying something that teaches you critical thinking and transferrable skills – anthropology, say, or (in my case) Arabic and Islamic studies? Cuts to higher education mean that we're already seeing the end of some of those degrees often labelled as 'useless', yet the supposedly 'useful' subjects start to look less valuable when the jobs associated with them are replaced by AI models that didn't take three years to learn these skills. The end of university is already a terrifying time. Three or four years of preparing a bulletproof LinkedIn profile and creating a plan for the future suddenly becomes real. The last thing a person needs aged 21 is for an AI model to take the job they were told their degree was essential for. Today the playing field that exists is different to that of a year ago, and it will undoubtedly be different again when I and many other students graduate in a year's time. The adults who implore us to embrace AI to streamline everyday tasks and improve the efficiency of the working day often already have working days, a promise that feels as though it's drifting further and further away. Connor Myers is a student at the University of Exeter and an intern on the Guardian's positive action scheme
