Graduate son down about job search

[anotherglass]

Hello, my son graduated five months ago and after a couple of months travelling has commenced the job search. While he was enthusiastic at first, he has recently become quite demotivated and down. The process is quite brutal in sending off application after application but not hearing back or going through quite soulless online assessments, designed to weed out neurodivergent candidates. He has hobbies but is starting to become withdrawn and flat. I am worried about him. How can I best support him without being overbearing?

I think it’s rough at the minute
I’ve just been let go from a job after 8 weeks because.. they’re overstaffed

It’s taken a few months for my very qualified and experienced husband to get a job this year. And a decade ago as a graduate it took me 6 months to land a job and that was an apprenticeship (post Masters degree 🙃).

It’s hard, the market is shit, tell him this is normal and not his fault. Remind him he will get there in time. That there’s no rush. That he’s got time.

Ds gave up looking for a year in industry in the end and just carried on with his degree. He is ND and always fails the online assessments! He graduated this year and has got a job (only one he applied for) but still waiting on a start date. In the meantime he is doing an internship at a start up and also doing zero hours shifts at the weekend in a warehouse.

Cover supervisors are in demand and you don't need any teaching qualifications or experience.

It would teach him a lot of transferable skills.

Sign up with a few agencies.

The ones I used for supply teaching

Teacher Active
Smile Education
Hays
Jambo

The pay starts at about £50 - £80 per day.

I realise it might be his idea of hell but it is money, it gets you out of the house and it fills up your CV.

It’s hardly discriminatory. It’s a core part of the role at Trailfinders to advise clients on how to build an end to end itinerary around remote parts of the world. Hence the name. I can’t see how you could do this without having been there. Certainly when we needed to build a three week trip to Aus and NZ including numerous forms of transport, hiking trips and lodge stays we went to TF who spent 2 hours building an itinerary making recommendations and booking things. I would have been pretty bemused if the consultant had no experience of what he was suggesting.
Its not just booking flights to Greece for a week.

I don’t think a lot of people realise, how truly hard it is for young adults to find even part time jobs it’s ridiculous. All you ever hear about is all these jobs where exactly are they ? .

He knows two people who work there (annoyingly, he told one about the role). they both come from pretty wealthy backgrounds. DS went to see one of them and the weekend and he said everyone who works there is from a similar background.

He hasn't just 'booked a holiday to Greece for a week'. He has been to many very unusual places in Europe , including up and coming Albania, Slovenia, Serbia and to Andorra- all independently, whilst working a job. This is what he can afford , time and money wise. I am pretty impressed by this. Not everyone has access to Gap year funds. Anyway, it is what it is. Gone are the days it seems where jobs train you up . ETA : TF have as a perk that they send their employees on training trips to find out about places- not that they expect you to already know, What happened was that eh couldn't fill in three questions on the application form, even though those questions weren't related to the person specification. Oddly enough he got shortlisted the first time he applied when he was 21 when he had been nowhere. I expect there is a reason to do with pay grades there perhaps.

He is obviously looking elsewhere. To be honest, neither of his mates really enjoy the job!

Of course he needs to disclose (assuming that he has a formal diagnosis, and if he doesn't then it sounds as if he needs one ASAP) You say yourself that he is failing because of his neurodivergence - what else does "online assessments .... designed to weed out neurodivergent candidates" mean? - so he needs suitable adaptations. He can only get those by disclosure. That's how the adult world works.

It might pick up after the budget? There's so much speculation going on i think a lot of companies might delay recruiting till after any fall out from the budget has settled.

It is tough out there. Entry level jobs for graduates have really taken a hit from ai too.

All i can suggesr is I did a short level 3 course a 4 years ago in something niche and that did more for my career than my degree level qualification did. My dh did a short project management course and that also helped him a lot. Employers seemed disproportionately interested in his Prince2 compared to his degree. But this wss 10 years ago now..

So maybe a shorter lower level course on something niche could help get into something and stop him being bored whilst he job hunts.

The degree is just one element of the application. On the CV make the most of work experience, part time jobs, volunteering, etc. Can he talk about his experience of teamwork, communication, analysis skills, etc. In the meantime, get him to find a cheap/free course on AI. That’s one of the big areas of growth and something in demand by employers - not to become an AI specialist but to be competent in its use.

I feel so sad for these young people. I am grandma age and when I graduated I walked into a job and could have had my pick of several. If I did not like the job I could just leave, secure in the knowledge that I could walk into another. And my education had been fully funded so I had no debt.

What was different? One factor is that when I was at uni only about 5% of the population went, so a degree had real value. It got you a good job. The egalitarian ideal of uni being more available has backfired as a degree now has little clout in the job market. It is all based on the fallacy that a degree is the only route to success and that academic process is the be-all and end-all. I am so pleased to see that in-employment education and apprenticeships are gaining ground.

These hard-working young people have worked their tripe out and accumulated huge debt for no gain. I feel for them.

Applying for most graduate training jobs starts during final year, not months after you finish unless you are planning to take a year out and start the following sept? As someone also said upthread I'd encourage him to tick some boxes, big companies want to up their diversity and if you tick the disabled box you get a guaranteed interview. He will then get experience at interviews and eventually get lucky. You do obviously have to meet the essential criteria and sometimes desirable criteria if there's loads of applications but it gives you a leg up. This obviously will only work with big companies though, if he is applying to a small firm they won't care about this sort of thing and may even discriminate.

In fact I have just checked my figures and 4% of school leavers went to uni when I went and only 1.8% of all 18 year olds .... no wonder a degree was a more valuable passport to a job then.

If today's young people have been sold the idea of a degree solely as a job passport then no wonder they are feeling down. It is a sorry situation. University can of course be valuable in and of itself ... but many school- leavers now must be wondering whether it was worth it.

Having a degree is literally the basic standard, probably what having 5 GCSE's was 30 years ago, the problem is it costs young people around 60k in debt to go to uni now and takes 3-4 years, that's after 2 years doing a-levels. Where I work the entry level admin job asks for a degree, you'd go in the bin on the very first sift without one, once upon a time that job would have been filled by a school leaver. So it takes 5-6 years extra and 60k of debt to get your first entry level job that you'd have walked into straight from the school gates 30 years ago. Degrees just don't hold as much value as they did once upon a time, but happen to cost the earth to get one!

It’s hard for everyone. I can’t find a job in my field (100s of applicants, low pay) nor out of my field (overqualified, too expensive).
Its gruelling.

What is needed is an emphasis on other routes to a career than going to uni.

It’s bloody awful at the moment. DS and DD both have friends that are still job hunting after graduating this year.

There seems to have been a big drop in the number of ‘starter’ jobs. Lost to either AI or outsourcing abroad (like my company).

It’s easy to say but keep encouraging him. He will get there.

A couple of the friends have got basic NHS admin jobs and then moved on from there. Would that be worth a try?

I dont think the current cohort of graduates are comparing themselves to a long time ago.

There has been about 35% of school leavers going to university for some time now, even in the late 90s it was 25%. So I think they are looking at the job market in much more recent years. Its said to be the worst job market since 2018 and 33% less jobs than this time last year.

There is a wider issue about degrees and the employment market and are they worth it, but I do think ops son has entered the world at a particular rough patch.

There are less jobs due to automation, AI, changing habits, for example online shopping vs going in and being served by people. Factories are outsourced, call centres.

OP your son has good CV aspects. Get him to do more volunteering and explain resilient mindset. He will get a job but it might take 200 applications and it might not be dream job but a pathway there.

He will get there. Its just a slog and easy to lose heart. With a degree so many more opportunities are open too. It's.just a slog ! He needs to.keep going for the jobs he wants. Don't take something that he could just get disillusioned with.

It’s tough out there and hard to know the answer. Really it’s a bit of luck and a numbers game. I’ve been a recruiter over 10 years. For some jobs especially grad jobs we can easily get inundated with over 200 applications in under a week and around 90% of CVs are pretty much the same and the same qualification. The other 10% are irrelevant for the job. If your son is applying for jobs in another area to where he lives make sure he says at the opening paragraph of his cv he currently lives in x and easily and quickly able to relocate. Don’t apply for a job in Inverness if you live in SE England when the reality is he won’t want to move there for an entry level salary for example. We get lots of applicants who say I’m willing to relocate to anywhere but the reality is v different and often get people who haven’t even looked into how far it is.

The more work experience he can get the better and even a Xmas temp retail job can lead somewhere.

It is never guaranteed, because there could be hundreds of applicants meeting the minimum criteria and ticking the box and companies are not committed to interview them all.

It’s a blardy awful market right now.
can you and he and your family and his sports coaches, milk your networks? Beg work experience ?

also consider part time work at Sainsburys, M&S, Waitrose, Aldi, Lidl etc especially now - in the run up to Christmas.
I used to stack shelves in M&S when I was at law school! And did cleaning jobs. I then did some menial admin jobs via various agencies until I could find a graduate role. Which ended up not being in law. I joined the Big 4 during the last major reduction in grad recruits (mine was the smallest intake for a long while). I needed a job and the Big 4 would take me. If I had not got that role I was considering the supermarket grad schemes.

he may need to do something similar. Apply for everything!!! With a view that the majority of grad roles will start next August or September. And he is competing with those graduating in 2026 as well as this year so needs to be totally on it.

and he needs to keep up with his hobbies so he can sound interesting at interview.

also worth asking the other adults involved in his hobby whether they have any jobs. My brother did some landscape gardening as a filler when he was job seeing, via his rugby club.

best of luck.

What was his degree subject?

I agree it's extremely hard for Grads. Companies are not hiring as there isn't optimistim about the economy, the NI increase and workers rights have increased employers fear for the liabilities should they take on staff.

There are also too many grads in the marketplace whereas there has been less investment in trades. There is often poor career advice, an example, I've seen numerous students being recruited for Cyber security at colleges & Universities who have a lower academic ability. Sure it's a growth marketplace but employers want much higher academic levels so they often recruit from overseas, rather than UK.

I personally worked with a student who had been sold this career but he didn't have the ability to succeed. Uni isn't right for everyone and the balance isn't currently correct.

To those saying, I had it tough..I don't agree, it's way harder now as salaries and living costs are out of balance. I accept that whilst there were cycles in job markets I had more openings than many of the grads now and living costs such as rent and transport were not as high.

One of my children was in a similar position. They picked their degree specifically because it was a skills shortage area. All through uni they were told "you'll have a job lined up by graduation, you'll be able to take your pick" which suddenly changed to "oh this is the worst year ever for jobs!"

They initially assumed they'd get a job in their uni city but none were advertised and it's too expensive a city to live in alone with the zero hours minimum wage job they'd had at uni. So they came home, assuming as we're also in a big city they'd find a job in their field here.

Anyway, the advice I gave to them was to treat applying for jobs as a full-time job in itself. They were doing a two-fold search: any work at all and a job in their field.

I also encouraged them to stay active, meet friends for a coffee, do a bit of DIY for grandparents etc. I didn't want them falling into a pattern of staying in bed/not seeing anyone.

I suggested they'd have more luck with jobs with unsociable hours - night shifts and whatever, and we'd work out the logistics afterwards. That paid off and they got a minimum wage hospitality job which gets them out of the house, keeps a bit of money coming in and padded their CV out slightly. Yes sometimes s it involves me picking them up at 5am because there's no buses, but it is what it is.

They ended up applying for any job in their field advertised nationally, rather than just commutable distances. Ended up getting a job after their 7th interview but in a city a couple of hours away so they'll have to move. Now, they could only do this because we're luckily in a position where we can pay their first month's rent and deposit, plus give them some money to tide them over until their first pay day. If you're in a position to do that, then make it clear to them that they're not on their own and you'll support them practically too. I know many people are rigid about this type of thing and believe in making young people stand on their own two feet, but given the difficulties in securing jobs I couldn't give two hoots - they're already moving away to a city they don't know, by themselves with no support network there. If you're not in a position to do that financially, think about other ways to support if they have to move away. Do you know anyone in a different part of the country who could put them up for a few weeks? Can they sell stuff on Vinted? Can you loan them your car?

Good luck. It's tough out there but just emphasise to them it's not them, it's the situation and they just need to keep trying.