What Do Graduates Do?

What Do Graduates Do? our annual publication on graduate destinations, produced jointly with AGCAS, has come out this morning. You may have seen some of the press coverage.

For most UK graduates employment is steadily increasing, unemployment is slowly decreasing.

• 284,160 students graduated in 2010 with a first degree – a 3.6% increase on last year
• 69.7% (163,090 graduates) were in employment six months after graduation
• Unemployment went down from 8.9% to 8.5%
• Record number (100,265 or 63.4%) secured graduate level jobs

The figures show recovery in business and financial services with 7.5% of graduates working in these occupations, the same as that recorded in 2008. Marketing, sales and advertising was the occupational group that saw the largest percentage jump in graduates in 2010. 

The graduate labour market seemed to be very slowly recovering at the start of 2011, and the first half of the year seemed to follow the pattern of painstaking economic recovery, so we've no real reason to believe much changed up until then. The present turmoil in the Eurozone started in earnest during the summer, but as GDP figures show that the economy was still slowly recovering up until September at the least, so the likelihood is that, as things stand, the employment market for this summers' graduates is, at worst, not likely to be too much different to last year's - in other words, not as good as it has been, but better than it was a couple of years ago.