The class of 2024 first-degree graduates in the United Kingdom (UK) is navigating one of the toughest job markets in decades.
Employers received an average of 140 applications for every graduate vacancy in 2024, a 59% jump from 86 the previous year and the highest figure recorded by the Institute of Student Employers (ISE) in more than 30 years of surveys.
Many new graduates describe months of applications, automated rejections, ghosting after assessments, and settling for non-graduate roles. While official employment rates for graduates remain higher than for non-graduates, the lived experience of job hunting has become significantly harder.
Also, the share of UK graduates in full-time work after 15 months has fallen from 59.6 per cent for the 2020-21 cohort, who began job hunting at the height of a post-Covid surge in hiring, to 54.8 per cent for the 2024 cohort, found in a report by Prospects, part of the data agency Jisc.
Graduate unemployment rose from 5 per cent to 6.8 per cent over the same period, while part-time employment rose from 10.4 per cent to 13.1 per cent and the share doing unpaid work also increased. Among those who found work, the share in professional roles fell from 75.5 per cent to 70.9 per cent.
Charlie Ball, head of labour market intelligence at Jisc, said the tough graduate jobs market was largely a reflection of economic pressures that small businesses found especially difficult to navigate.
“The labour market is about where you’d expect it to be in a sluggish economy that hasn’t seen significant growth for a decade,” he said. While larger employers were aware of the need to maintain a talent pipeline, small businesses were “fundamentally less able to absorb the costs associated with uncertainty”.
AI may be eroding opportunities in a few “niches”, Ball said.
He noted that coders, management consultants and graphic designers — whose work may be more easily automated — were among the occupations where graduate hiring fell most.
By contrast, accountants and lawyers whose work is also exposed to AI were among those where hiring rose most.
Primary teachers and housing officers, which were among the hardest-hit roles, most likely reflected funding cuts, Ball said.
He acknowledged that rapid advances in AI capabilities were adding to the wider sense of caution. In conversations with small businesses especially, “a lot of people are saying . . . we don’t want to recruit a bunch of people we have to lay off in 18 months because it turns out models can do that job,” he said.
Pointing to the rise in part-time work, Ball said it was “a negative outcome for many graduates” but also reflected a societal shift away from traditional working patterns.
Self-employment, which dropped sharply during the pandemic, was also on the rise again, the survey found. This could include entrepreneurs, those doing contract work in coding or “someone working 20 hours a week at Tesco with a couple of graphic design clients”.
Jisc’s analysis is based on survey data collected by the Higher Education Statistics Agency in late 2025 from about 182,000 graduates, excluding international students and those with postgraduate qualifications.
It follows official data on the wider UK jobs market published this week. This showed employment stabilising after two years of decline, but a new fall in vacancies at smaller businesses, which said high costs stopped them from hiring.
