Image: JJ Ellison [CC BY-SA 3.0] via Wikimedia Commons
Report reveals optimism for graduate jobs, but warns disruptions remain
The graduate jobs market has been the “least affected part of the economy” during the pandemic, although Covid-19 will still have a “profound” impact on opportunities for university leavers, according to higher education experts.
This rare piece of good news for students in 2020 comes via the ‘What do graduates do?’ report from university IT firm Jisc and careers service Prospects.
In the report Charlie Ball, head of higher education intelligence at Prospects, said that graduate jobs had proven to be “the least affected part of the economy”.
He noted that demand in healthcare—the largest area of graduate employment—had been “relatively lightly affected” by Covid-19. And many business services and technology firms—another high employment area for graduates—had switched to home working without losing demand for workers.
But Ball stressed that while the pre-pandemic job market for graduates had been relatively “robust”, with unemployment running at 5.5 per cent, Covid-19 “will obviously have a profound effect” on the overall jobs market.
“Even if a vaccine is successfully rolled out, we can’t assume an automatic return to ‘normal’ for young people starting out in their careers next year. But by looking at what happened to the last graduating cohort pre-pandemic there are some clear signals that help us to predict what they may find.”
Jisc and Prospects looked at pre-pandemic data released in June by the the Higher Education Statistics Agency on graduate outcomes data and questioned graduates from the 2017-18 cohort 15 months after they left university for the study.
While this is pre-pandemic data, it provides “an important benchmark to understand what graduates do in the wake of a crisis,” writes Marc Lintern, president of the Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services.
This analysis revealed a familiar story on the difference in employment rates between white graduates and Black, Asian and minority ethic graduates. While 61.6 per cent of white graduates were in full-time employment at the time of the survey, the figure was 53.5 per cent for BAME graduates.
Elsewhere, Jisc and Prospects found that 71.8 per cent of working graduates were in professional roles, with healthcare the most common area of work for graduates at 14.9 per cent of the graduate workforce.
Just over 60 per cent of graduates in employment returned to their home towns to work, while 12.4 per cent were in further study, around half on master’s degrees.