I'm finishing the factsheets that some people have seen at the moment and then will get to grips with the major labour market report, which examines each region of the UK in turn, before doing some analysis of graduate mobility and regional retention.
There's a lot of data to be examined and a number of conclusions to be drawn. The recession has had an impact on local labour markets and made this kind of analysis more important - there are a lot of differences between London and the rest of the country, unsurprisingly. As the attached figure, showing the number of last year's graduates known to be working in each region six months after graduating, shows, London and the south east are important, but most graduates don't work there.
It's become plain that there's a need to keep everyone up to date with local developments and we're always keen to hear from people who maintain a watch on local labour markets and are happy to share information and resources. After all, you may be an expert on the Manchester labour market, but if you've got a student from Plymouth who wants to go home after graduation, you need to be able to get that data from somewhere.
Also, if people have useful links and resources for local labour market information, we'd be very keen to know so we can get together a good library of local resources for everyone.
Information sharing is the best way to ensure we all have the best tools for students, and we hope that the information we'll be sharing will be useful for the sector. More to come soon.
6 comments:
A few LMI sites, some with a Scottish flavour: http://www.centreforcities.org/data.html
http://www.glasgoweconomicfacts.com/
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/Search/Q/Subject/465
https://www.nomisweb.co.uk/
Very handy - and let's hope Nomis (or the proposed ONS Data Explorer) continues to be such a useful resource.
How could I have forgooten http://www.skillsdevelopmentscotland.co.uk/knowledge/research-online.aspx?!
Is the sample all graduates who are employed, or all graduate-level jobs filled in the year?
My purely anecdotal experience in my bit of the West Midlands is that graduates who stay local take jobs below graduate level.
Ian, it's all graduates employed.
West Midlands (which is a big region, and where I started my career - non-graduate, thanks for asking) had about 64% of locally-employed graduates from last summer working in graduate level employment six months after graduating - it hasn't changed a lot this year.
But this varies widely from the best prospects in Warwickshire, to the worst, in Herefordshire.
Also, included in that 64% are all the doctors, nurses and teachers and other public sector employees who are often in vocational roles. In fact only just over 50% of graduates entering private sector employment were at graduate level in the region six months after graduating - a sizeable cohort but I can understand that the experience of a lot of graduates will be that good jobs seem thin on the ground.
Just to stress, the kind of info I've just provided to Ian will be in the full report (once it's out).
We'll be making factsheets about local employment markets available on the HECSU website in the next few weeks - we're just making sure they're robust, usable and as accurate as we can make them.
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