Recent studies 1 2 illustrate the struggle of new graduates in the UK as they experience the worst job market conditions in years. While millions of Americans are vocalizing their anger and disenchantment, the stories of these newcomers illustrate the dramatic gap between promise and performance.
Leah Savage, a 24-year-old graduate and first-class honours degree in marketing management, represents the thousands more hit by the damaging trend. As a career-changer, while taking classes, she worked a year-long internship with Amazon. In the last 6 months, she has applied to almost 100 jobs and landed just two interviews. Savage recounts the experience as “demoralising,” sharing, “All I do is wake up and apply for five hundred jobs. I’ll call across the board and people will tell me, they’d love to do it but they’re not hiring right now.” She believes her degree is growing more useless by the day if it’s not aiding her in getting a job.
Likewise, Miranda Alford, a 22-year-old recent graduate, has struggled to find a foothold in the entry-level job market. She describes it as a “food desert.” She said that her university education had her ill-prepared for being out in the real world looking for jobs. Alford was able to quickly land a temporary position as a receptionist, but that position will be over next month. That search has added a lot of stress, she explains, “I mean, it can be like really, really stressful. Entry-level jobs that typically now require anywhere from 2-10 years of experience in the field. This results in a maddening catch-22, since they usually pay very little.
Those same challenges are felt by other recent graduates as well. For David Weston, 23, it took over six months and over 200 applications before landing a job. He eventually took a job shelving cans at a distribution center after taking his politics degree off his resume. Looking back on his experience, Weston noted, “For most of my education, I was instructed to work hard and get a degree, as if that would practically promise me a job. That wasn’t the case.”
Lee, a school leaver who completed his A-levels this summer, has been looking for work in Manchester for the last four months. Lee describes the job market as “a waste of time and very depressing,” adding that employers often require experience that is unattainable without having held a job first: “They ask you for experience that you can’t get without first having a job.”
Chouka Tung, 24, struggles to hold onto a regular source of income. She relocated from Hong Kong to the UK, determined to build a career in journalism. Even with a journalism degree, breaks weren’t always easy to find. After a journey of “rejection after rejection,” she secured a part-time position at an Asian supermarket. Tung expressed on her experience, “The gap between what you think it’s going to be like and what it actually is is really, really intolerable.”
The stories of these new and recent graduates are indicative of a startling trend in today’s labor market. Instead, like others, they feel stuck applying to an eternity of rounds with nothing to show for their time. For Savage, the nonstop onslaught of rejection has caused him harm. Often a simple fix, such as correcting formatting, will render it AI-readable. In those situations, you can’t win,” she mourned.