Opinion Article
The graduate job hunt/ We're all in the same boat
If your algorithm has been anything like mine recently, you’ll have found yourself involuntarily inundated with a barrage of content pointing to the utter hopelessness of your future job prospects. Perhaps this has taken the form of an excessively brutal list of ‘the top ten least employable degrees of 2026’. Or maybe you’ve been subjected to a certain LSE alumnus asserting that ‘you’re cooked’ if you don’t, at the very least, graduate with a first from a Russell Group university. Alternatively, the dread may be induced through deceptively artistic means. In a recent TikTok post, one graduate displays a collage they made entirely from hundreds of application rejection emails (Beautifully tragic). Safe to say, it can all get a bit much.
Graduate Holding Cap and Diploma Aloft.
And yes, there’s an allure to the pessimist worldview. We’d be right not to shy away from the unpleasant verity of present circumstances. Ours is a graduate job market completely saturated. Half of UK adults aged 19 to 64 hold a degree or equivalent qualification (Department for Education), and when the masses are churned out year after year, there aren’t enough entry-level positions to accommodate. In London alone there were reportedly 13,000 graduate positions available before the pandemic, now there’s only a measly 2,000 (Bloomberg). Plus, the use of AI by recruiters and applicants has not only systematised the application process so that Indeed.com feels like some Kafkaesque hall of mirrors, but it has also served to replace the very same roles that would’ve previously been assigned to interns and junior-level staff (BBC). We’ll take it from here...
However, I assure you, my aim is not to send you spiralling further. In fact, despite unlikely fortunes, I’d like to offer you some sense of quiet self-assurance as you approach the leap into the unknown.
The other day a friend said to me, ‘this is the first time in my life that I don’t know what I’ll be doing a year from now’. Surely a horrifying prospect? I think not. This uncertainty is unsettling yes, but exciting too. It means our futures are open to more possibilities for growth and success than ever before. So what if Keats wrote his entire oeuvre before the age of 26? We, unlike him, have the gift of time. The HESA found that 41% of graduates from 2022/23 weren’t in full-time employment when surveyed 15 months after leaving higher education, meaning that we may well have time to spare before settling into a stable job. But this need not be a source for sorrow. We should take advantage of this time and view the job hunt as character-building resilience training, not failure. I empathise with a desire to hit the ground running, but we can use the extra time we may have to build on our skills and gain new life experiences. We should fixate, sharply and with genuine intent, only on what we possess the capacity to control, and nothing else.
What’s more, we should give ourselves the grace to reflect on how far we’ve come. Upon graduating, we’ll have dedicated years of our lives to the pursuit of knowledge and self-improvement. This is a remarkable achievement, and we should stand proud of the work we’ve accomplished. Perhaps we’ll be the very first in our families to have attained a higher-level qualification or perhaps we’ve worked tirelessly alongside our studies to pay the bills. These are endless accolades of our personal development, and they speak to the fortitude of our determination. We must never lose sight of these unspoken triumphs.
A thought that often brings me solace in this time of tumult is that we soon-to-be-graduates are all united in this generational strife. The graduate job market will affect us all in different ways, but we are all together in the same boat. So, I implore you, do not despair. Take every day as it comes. You will land ashore eventually.