More effects of recession

The recession has affected the employment prospects of graduates in a number of ways.

Not only has the unemployment rate gone up, but the proportion of those graduates unemployed after six months, but who have a job to go to within the next month, has also declined.

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The big dropoff took place last year, but it is worrying to note that not only do graduates seem to be more likely to be unemployed, but they're also moving out of unemployment in fewer numbers. 15% of unemployed PhDs and 9% of unemployed Masters graduates had a job to go to within a month. Let's see how this all changes this year.

This blog has a dull title

It does.

Anyone got a better idea for a title for the blog than 'HECSU Blog'?

This will stop me renaming it with obscure song lyrics.

Also, feel free to praise or condemn our redesign, which has strained the limits of my rudimentary HTML.

Has the recession meant graduates have increasingly been going overseas to work?

We have had that question quite a lot in the last few months.

So we took a look at the destination data. This graph comes from the HESA Destinations of Leavers of Higher Education data, and looks at the location of employment of UK graduates six months after they left university.

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The answer seems to be 'no'. In fact, there hasn't been a lot of change in the patterns of location of employment of graduates as a whole as we moved from economic growth to recession.

What does this tell us? Well, firstly, it confirms that there's  little sign of a loss of new graduates from the country as a result of the downturn. That's not very surprising, really. This was a global recession, after all.

But the lack of changes in regional employment could mean a number of things. It does rather point to the idea that quite a lot of graduates may not be very mobile at this stage. If regional labour markets start to deteriorate as a result in cuts to their public sector employers, this may have implications for their ability to find work elsewhere.

I may look into this further if I have a bit more time.