A High Fliers recruitment survey has revealed that this year's graduates will face 33% more competition for jobs than last year's equivalent demographic. This means that this year's graduates are entering a market in which there are a third more leavers jostling for the same number of employment opportunities.
The study was conducted using a group of 18,000 students at the UK's top thirty universities. However, the study also suggests that there is a renewed and growing confidence in the provision of the graduate market: 40% will take up a job this year, compared to 35% last year, and graduates are also expecting salaries to be higher. It seems that despite the vicious competition for places, graduates have confidence in their degrees and in their CVs.
There are also 25% of people intending to stay in higher education, doing postgraduate degrees. The postgraduate does not signify your intention to stay in academia indefinitely (although many who choose to continue to study may well hope to). It can be a stop-gap for those who have not secured employment placement straight away, or, who missed graduate employment deadlines first time around and would rather postpone applications for the job of their choice than recourse to a contingency position.
In some professions, for example, journalism, it can enhance your employment credentials. City University and The University of Kent, whose postgraduates start this year, offer journalism postgraduate courses. At Kent, who already run an undergraduate degree, practical instruction is combined with academic discipline to ensure that the graduating classes have completed NCTJ examinations whilst still having a comprehensive grounding in the legal, political and historical context of the UK and what this means for their job. One suspects that the graduates and postgraduates of these courses will be rather serene about the increased competition for jobs.
Postgraduate study is expensive and funding limited, prescribing its opportunities to a smaller group of young people. However, it is certainly a credible reason to postpone entering the employment market. There is a temptation among final year undergraduates to scare each other into accepting the first offer that appears in your inbox. Suffocating in the pressure cooker of finals and, particularly for those at top-flight universities, finding a new terrain of competition in graduate employment market as they reach the point at which they have exhausted academia?????s competitive potential, students will take anything so that they can say that they have something. There is little benefit. Reconsider the speed with which you bid farewell to higher education altogether and think laterally, long-term, sensibly.
Phoebe, GRB Journalist
