First degrees : Employment in 'graduate' occupations

Measures of unemployment and employment only give a partial view of the recruitment picture.The recent recession has left the UK labour market in a state of uncertainty. But, whilst there are more redundancies still expected in the public sector, at the start of 2010 jobs were being created in the business and financial services sector. According to the AGR survey, summer review 2009, during the recession many of the organisations offering graduate vacancies reduced recruitment budgets. In this kind of climate graduates are no longer just competing with the previous year’s cohort, they are also competing against graduates from past cohorts who are still trying to get a graduate level occupation. This has put more emphasis on knowing the type of job that graduates are undertaking in order to establish whether there is improvement in the graduate labour market.

Using the graduate job classifications developed by Professors Peter Elias and Kate Purcell for their study Seven Years On: Graduates in the Changing Labour Market, the types of work that new graduates went into, as reported in the DLHE surveys for the last five years, were categorised into 5 groups. Table 2 shows the fluctuation in the proportion of graduates from these cohorts obtaining a graduate level job six months after graduation. In 2010, a record number of graduates from 2009/10 100,265, or 63.4% of those known to be working six months after graduation, found graduate level jobs. This is an increase of 9.2% on the 2008/09 figure, further evidence of an improvement in the graduate employment market in the last year.

Source: DLHE 2006 to 2010