News on job prospects
Keep up-to-date with these important facts about the UK job market.
Graduates finding career start difficult
Climbing up the career development ladder is a difficult task for anyone, but even getting a start has proven extremely difficult for graduates of late.
The public services sector has long complained that it has struggled to attract the best talent but over the past couple of years even it has been having to turn graduates away because there are too many applicants and too few positions.
Indeed, figures from the Association of Graduate Recruiters (ARG) show that there are on average 73 graduates applying for every vacancy in the sector.
“We certainly like to think that we’re in a buyers’ market, not just on the graduate side but across the board,” says Max Barnard, recruitment manager at Look Ahead Housing and Care.”
“We had about 220 applications to our graduate scheme this year and we’ve taken 10 graduates on. We did see a lot of really, really good people, and even if you’d taken out those 10, we’d still have been able to find 10 people who were, if not as good, very close to the standard we’d expect.”
Chartered Management Institute, 24 August 2012
17 applications per job, down from 20 on the quarter.
Research from the Totaljobs Barometer, which analyses the behaviour of 4.4 million jobseekers and 5,000 recruiters each month, reveals that competition for jobs has reached an average of 17 applications per job, which is a fall on the quarter but is a 5% increase compared to the same period in 2011. (July 2012)
No regular job for over 450,000 Neets.
The Work Foundation says more than 450,000 Neets – youngsters not in education, employment or training – have never had a regular job. Report author Paul Sissons says young people can lack the “soft skills” needed for the jobs available to them in the service sector. He says youngsters need help at “this crucial point of transition”. The report from the Work Foundation think tank warns of a long-term problem of Neets – aged between 16 and 24 – who have never successfully made the first steps from education into employment. “We know that if young people haven’t got on to the first rung of the job ladder by 24, they will suffer the consequences for the rest of their lives.” (July 2012)
Graduate recruitment set to increase but only for those with work experience, according to High Fliers.
Employers expect to hire 6.4% more graduates in 2012 than they did in 2011 but graduates who have no work experience at all whilst at university stand little or no chance of getting a job offer from the country’s most prestigious graduate employers.
The Graduate Market in 2012 - a study of graduate vacancies and starting salaries at Britain’s one hundred leading employers conducted by High Fliers Research in December 2011, found a record 36% of this year’s graduate vacancies are expected to be filled by applicants who have already worked for the organisation during their studies.
Half the employers included in the research have increased their graduate recruitment targets for 2012 and there are additional roles on offer in nine of the 14 industries and employment areas featured in the report. Despite the recruitment freeze at many Government departments and agencies, graduate vacancies in the public sector are expected to increase by a fifth this year - in part because of the expansion of the Teach First scheme which is set to hire 1,000 graduates for the first time in 2012. There are also more opportunities at engineering & industrial companies, IT & telecommunication firms, high street banks, investment banks and retailers.
On average, employers have received 19% more applications for their graduate programmes this year, with some recruiters reporting double the usual volume of applicants in the early part of their 2011-2012 recruitment campaign. A number of well-known organisations have already closed off the application process for their 2012 positions. In 2011, recruiters received an average of 48 applications per graduate vacancy.
The majority of employers are not planning to increase their graduate remuneration in 2012 - the average graduate starting salary remains at £29,000 for the third year running.
Despite the widespread recruitment freeze at Government departments & agencies, public sector employers are planning to expand their graduate intake by 21.9% in 2012, an increase of almost 500 additional roles year-on-year.
There will also be a substantial rise in the number of graduate jobs available at engineering & industrial companies (up 22.4% compared to 2011), IT & telecommunications firms (up 31.6%), high street banks (up 16.0%) & retailers (up 11.5%).
Although these recruitment targets for 2012 are encouraging and build on the increases in vacancies seen in 2011 and 2010, graduate recruitment at the UK’s leading employers remains below pre-recession levels. Across all the organisations featured within the research, graduate recruitment in 2012 is still 6% below that recorded in 2007. By contrast, an extra 50,000 new graduates are expected to leave university in the summer of 2012, compared
The five universities most-often targeted by Britain’s top graduate employers in 2011-2012 are Manchester, London (including Imperial College, University College and the London School of Economics) Cambridge, Nottingham and Oxford.
Virtually all of the UK’s leading graduate employers are offering paid work experience programmes for students and recent graduates during the 2011-2012 academic year - a total of 11,296 places are available.
Managing director of High Fliers Research, Martin Birchall said: “With a record number of students due to finish university in 2012, it’s very welcome news that Britain’s best-known and most sought-after employers are offering more graduate vacancies this year, especially considering the continuing uncertainty about the wider economic outlook. But today’s report includes the stark warning to the ‘Class of 2012’ that in a highly competitive graduate job market, new graduates who’ve not had any work experience at all during their time at university have little hope of landing a well-paid job with a leading employer, irrespective of the academic results they achieve or the university they’ve attended.” ( www.hrmagazine.co.uk, 13 Jan 2012)