Graduate unemployment soars

Undergraduate unemployment is higher than it has been for 17 years, the Higher Education Careers Service Unit (HECSU) announced last week.

HESCU revealed differences in prospects by subject area: graduates in economics, Media Studies, Information Technology and Engineering are finding it most difficult to find jobs, with over 11 per cent of graduates remaining unemployed after six months. On the other hand, students of the social sciences such as Law and Psychology are reported to have far better prospects.

Even students already past university are suffering the effects of the recession, with 1 in 11 young people who graduated before 2010 unable to find jobs. Until the economy fully recovers, it will remain difficult for graduates to find work, and even then new graduates will have to deal with stiff competition from those who failed to find work before they graduated.

Such analyses have been criticised for measuring from only six months after graduation, which second year Maths and Business student Aarani Saskandarajah claims is “nowhere near enough time for students to establish themselves after leaving university; I am sure many won’t even have made a final decision on a career path that quickly.” The statistics also ignore students who choose to continue with postgraduate education rather than risk the over-competiveness of the job market, in which some students are applying for hundreds of jobs at the same time in an effort to gain any sort of work experience.

Graduates from the University of Warwick have suffered from the recession, with one per cent fewer of 2009’s first degree graduates finding work than the year before. The picture is better for postgraduates on research degrees, for whom employment levels have actually increased. In fact, graduate recruiters are still omnipresent on campus, and Warwick students remain consistently in the top three most attractive to larger business and finance corporations, according to statistics from High Flyers, a business involved in graduate recruitment.

Students at Warwick also appear to be responding to the market’s increasing demands for quality and preparedness from graduates. The careers fair in the second week of term had a 25 per cent attendance increase over last year, with over three thousand students turning up, including a greater number of freshers.

Another reason for the relatively favourable position of Warwick students may be the activities of the Department of Careers and Skills, whose team of over 60 staff aim to “inspire students with an entrepreneurial approach and the spirit of innovation into spontaneous thinkers with high level of practical skill,” according to the Head of Careers, Anne Wilson. “Students need to consider that the bleakness of the media view on the job market does not need to apply to the best prepared, best trained and most enthusiastic candidates.”

Over half of graduate recruiters working in Warwick raised their targets for recruiting graduates for this year. KMPG, PWC, and Deloitte remain the largest of these operating on campus, illustrating the preference of financial and business institutions for Warwick students, with Non-Governmental Organisations such as Teach First providing many career opportunities for the less business-inclined. The biggest chances of unemployment are likely to present themselves to students who favoured public sector positions, as the Government’s attempts to reduce the fiscal deficit impact on the number of available vacancies.

The Department of Student Careers and Skills told the Boar that more could be done to help students’ prospects, suggesting that more academic departments should offer a greater number of integrated work experience placements to their own students, and arguing that this work experience is the single most important distinguishing factor that employers look for.

The Department of Student Careers and Skills added, “40% of finalists admitted that they wished that they had started looking for career opportunities earlier.”