Did your son or daughter struggle to find work after university?

Yeah, it was a big disappointment as a years placement was heavily touted as being part of the course. It does seem to be a general problem atm from what I’ve read elsewhere.

It’s hard to supervise a placement student when your department is going through major restructuring (and is still expected to have the same output as before the last round of redundancies with 20% less people due to AI). I work for a multinational, and we’re not simply not able to offer many placements at the moment as we don’t have capac. We’re also barely hiring any STEM grads into R&D these days. It’s as bad as I’ve ever seen it (I’ve worked for my current employer for 20 years).

Yes placements have halved for the university we know in last year or so. Really sad.

@HarryLimeFoxtrot If that’s the case, don’t offer courses advertising a placement year. It’s clearly unfair marketing. Often students don’t realise the university doesn’t have a bank of placements for the students who want them. Universities write extensively about their industry links and then dc find these are very limited or, at worse, non existent. The advertising of these “opportunities” that don’t exist, need to stop. Students need to realise, and be advised, that finding a placement is tough, time consuming, and down to them.

The charity I work for offers placements for BA and MA students but we struggle to justify the costs and time it takes
If you get a good student they bring value to the team but they then move on and you have to start all over again
Poor students cost us money as we really try and help them to get back on track which eats up staff and supervision time
We used to also take 3rd and 4th year medical students on shorter placements but we couldn’t afford the level of support they needed!

DD studied SEN, Disability and Inclusion and then competed a PGCE. She got a SEN teaching position in April which she has just started this September. A lot of the others on her course have found it harder - she had a fair amount of additional experience after doing a gap year as a SEN TA then doing this part time to fund Uni, and also working at a SEN play scheme during her holidays for the last 4 years so I expect she stood out from other candidates fresh from uni who had less real experience.

ds graduated 2 years ago in constructuon managment, straight into a grad scheme, to the suprise of some friends who had been a bit sniffy about it not being a proper degree. Hes still with the company and on an ok wage and package. He did want a degree apprentiship but they went though the floor in covid. No year in industry , couldnt get one. Did have a bar/ waiting job from
16. His company have halved the grad scheme this year and friends son with a law degree from a russell group is still looking 2 yrs in.I worry about dd who is in year 2 of a biochem degree.more

My daughter did child nursing and graduated this year - into a previously unimaginable landscape of next to no jobs for newly-qualified nurses! Luckily she was one of the very few on her course to get a job very quickly in a London hospital. 38k, which goes up to around 43k taking into account nights and weekends. It’s obviously exhausting work, with huge responsibility for a 21 year or, but she’s grateful every day to have a job.

DS did a STEM degree at a RG uni and graduated this year.
He has been one of the lucky ones, didnt do the milk round this year but has found a graduate role locally on a better salary than me.

I graduated in 93 from a non-RG in archaeology, just as Time Team came out and digs realised they could charge people to work for them rather than pay them. I have never had a graduate job as a result. A lot of people on that course (which was rated in the top 10 of archaeology depts at the time with a lot of my lecturers appearing on Time Team and other archaeology programmes) also struggled and I only know a couple who successfully had a graduate role.

My chem eng grad DH, has rarely been out of employment (was made redundant once in the last major reccession) but found employment within a couple of months.

Graduate employment has been hit and miss since at least the 80's when the last time I can remember that allowed grads to walk into any job.

It wasnt easy, took a year. Competition came globally. Got there in the end. Definitely worth it long term. Getting a job is a job in itself.

DS graduated in 2025 and fortunately got a job straight away in a role related to his degree. He did have a massive hiccup - the graduate job he’d secured during his final year was withdrawn a month before he was due to start, fortunately he found something else very quickly.

His degree was a vocational one, which his school (grammar) had tried to dissuade him from applying as they felt he should apply for a course with higher entry requirements! Pure snobbery which could have backfired massively had he been unable to get a job.

We’ve recently recruited two apprentices at work - the vacancies were aimed at 18+ applicants and we expected applications from young people who’d just finished a levels/btecs. Of 40 applicants, 27 were from well qualified graduates, most with “good” degrees from RG unis. Shortlisting broke my heart 😢 but it did mean we have two fantastic new team members.

Our oldest DS joined the armed forces straight after finishing his masters. It is something he always wanted to do, my DH is ex-Navy, DF was marines, etc. He has a degree and masters in Computer Science and his goal is (was?) to work in software engineering (same as me!) post army.

When he finishes in 18 months, I think he'll have a hard time to find a job, AI has changed our field so much, there are few few openings for juniors or even mid-level sw engineers. In our well known large tech company we're exclusively hiring people will many years of experience (of course we had internships too, but no path from there is a permanent role ... not that such a concept really exists in our industry anymore!).

Our younger son is 2nd year PhD student, also computer science area. However, his area of research is "hot" right now, but that can change quickly.

We're only beginning to see the impact of AI in engineering areas. This is just the start, and the change will happen VERY quickly

I work in industry. I cannot control the way any university advertises its placements to potential applicants. But I totally understand why they have reduced in number. We don’t have the resources to run them these days.

Dd got a degree in English and a masters 1st from Durham. Currently works in a pub in Bristol. She said that they have a scary amount of desperate young people constantly coming n looking for work and feels she is lucky to have a job. She wants to ideally work in Journalism but is struggling to find anything. Fortunately she enjoys her job

DS1 graduated last year with a First in a STEM subject at Oxbridge [being slightly vague]. In his final year he applied for a bunch of R&D-oriented graduate schemes with big companies. He had relevant internships and work experience, a prize for performance in first-year exams (and was clearly on track for the First), carefully tailored paperwork for each application, took advice from the careers service, etc. - did everything right that I could see (and in my work I see a lot of undergraduates doing job-hunting). No success. In one case he got to the final round and it sounds (from the feedback they very helpfully gave) as though he just wasn't one of the best at the assessment centre on the day, fair enough, but in one shocking (to me) case of a scheme he'd been really keen on, he got eliminated on the basis of a recorded (AI-assessed?) interview and paperwork without any human ever actually meeting him. I'm thinking they must have been so overwhelmed with applicants that there was a lot of noise in that process.

What worked for him was a direct speculative approach to a startup. That was a completely different experience: he had two interviews both of which involved the CEO, they were talking science in the interviews right from the off (which he's much better at than STAR points about his qualities!). He was offered a job with better pay than the graduate schemes and is now very happily working there.

We have a lot of graduates applying for helper roles where I work too - along the lines of healthcare assistants/ TA type roles. Often they've been looking for graduate jobs in their field for a year or a couple of years and someone who works in our field has suggested that there are always jobs and it's as secure as anything is atm.

That's true, but unfortunately they are often not suitable, partly because it's not actually what they want to do and it shows! You need a bitvof a vocation... The ones who do workout are generally eager to re-train and get qualified, and start applying for another degree!

I'm glad your daughter enjoys her job - maybe there'll be potential for hospitality management or something corporate with the brewery building on her experience eventually.

None of my sons friends who went to uni have yet found anything. He had no interest in going,became a plumber, and is now earning 35k in his first job,which is only set to improve as he's joined a notable university site team. He gets healthcare, free meals,dental, gym and transport benefits.
My daughter also decided it wasn't worth it, and has taken a catering job while she learns to drive and is volunteering with a youth worker alongside taking counselling courses in the evening. She wants experience so she can join the police.

When our newly qualified teachers come to us saddled with such debt, I honestly think taking practical, AI proof qualifications makes good sense.

Is the idea of doing any sort of degree based on the idea that it may offer transferable skills becoming outdated now?

OP, I wouldn't take the responses to this thread as representative of outcomes for graduates.

I've seen a few similar threads and they seem to be dominated by parents who are delighted that their kids went straight into high-paying grad schemes or got the first rung on a stellar career. (More detail is sometimes a giveaway, e.g. "My DD came first out of 2,000 applicants...so what happened to the other 1999?) I don't know any graduates this year, but the ones I do know over the last few years have in some cases gone into jobs relevant to their degrees, but others (several) have done hospitality, retail etc. and sometimes get a grad job later, sometimes not and are still stuck on low wages in insecure work. Others have struggled to get anything at all.

I don't know any who have gone into grad schemes with large employers.

Dc2 is in this situation having recently completed a vocational masters with professional registration. Currently looking at short term and pt retail and customer service jobs as few entry level opportunities in her profession available at the moment(despite it being one with skills shortage) and those that are after often pt and/or fixed term. Not a new issue though, dc1 graduated in 2019 and struggled to find a position until post Pandemic,

This is likely to be the case for DD. There is a skills shortage for her degree, but recruitment is in cycles. She isn't tied to an area though and will go where the work is.

@RampantIvyyes, unfortunately the throughput is not seamlessly timed so that jobs come up regularly or on graduation. Very much a case of waiting for previous years’ graduates to apply and move onwards to release positions lower down. Even recruitment and onboarding is not speedy.

@phlebasconsidered And a NQT pays how much grad tax a month? They could end up being a head on £150,000. Few police officers get this although I hear the overtime is good. Domt the police want grads now ? I thought they wanted better quality recruits? Plumbing for a uni? What salary will that end up being? There are some dc who go to uni who will far exceed these salaries and no one can be a teacher without a degree. So it’s not choice. The plumber won’t be running the uni - that’s a given. It’s also interesting what people think are good salaries. For starters maybe but there’s little career structure for plumbers.

Both ours got jobs after graduation, Law for one Teaching the other but both are teachers now. Grandaughter did a Masters too and found work via her uni. I found a good career after doing a degree in my 40s. A degree is always worth it if you choose the right field. But even Andy Burnham has said he couldn’t find a job for a long dispiriting time after leaving Cambridge. Unlike other PMs he didn’t have that network to give jobs out, so very much like us then.

@walkingmycatnameddog “Give jobs out”? Some students just need to apply for any job! Most students don’t walk into jobs via who they know unless it’s a family firm. Most intelligent people who cannot find work after Oxbridge either have no idea what job they want or they are too choosy. I’ve seen both. Most find something they have built up a cv worth looking at.