Are graduates facing the worst jobs market on record?

I don’t know about you, but as soon as I graduated I immediately joined a graduate training scheme at a major blue-chip employer that led directly to a fulfilling and well-remunerated career that utilised every single one of my skills and aptitudes.

That’s what graduating used to be like, in the old days, before the wrong sort of people were doing the wrong sort of courses at the wrong sort of universities. These days, as even a cursory glance at the Telegraph will tell you, everything has gone rubbish. Or has anything really changed at all?

The public affairs team at Adzuna (a job advert aggregation site whose data is also used by the Office for National Statistics) will be due a decent performance-related bonus as the willingness of the above newspaper to use their stats as a springboard to make the traditional arguments has landed them a front page. Vacancies (for which read “online adverts for vacancies that are deliberately aimed at graduates and have Adzuna has spotted”) have fallen 45 per cent compared to last year.

(Is it possible that employers have realised they are “fuelling the degree myth by demanding qualifications their jobs don’t need”? We are not told)

What the data says

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It’s always worth digging into the specifics of data definitions – and Adzuna here is using an internal administrative classification which is built from the job advert title, description, and other structured data fields. It flags vacancies where jobs are marked as being either aimed at graduates, or requiring a degree to enter.

The first and most important thing to note is that the data does not say that there were 8,383 advertised vacancies for graduates in July 2026 – that was the average number of roles advertised per day. So if you’d have looked at Adzuna on a random day in July you may have seen more graduate roles, or less. But it still doesn’t feel like very many.

But then I started thinking about teaching. Although a degree (and/or a PGCE) is not, since around 2010, a requirement for a teaching role these are roles that tend to need graduates and tend to be done by graduates. And I know that in July 2026 Adzuna advertised 187,672 teaching positions. Not all of these will be entry level (suitable for a first teaching role) but it is likely most will be (there were just 484 vacancies for “senior teachers”).

And then there is nursing. Again, there are non-degree routes to a nursing career, but there are many nursing degrees and those who complete them tend to become nurses. Adzuna had 16,389 roles for “hospital nursing” in July 2026 and it is fair to bet that many of these would have been suitable for “first job” graduates.

To be clear, Adzuna is commendably open and transparent about what it does and both the strengths and limitations of this data. When used sensibly it is a very useful addition to our portfolio of graduate employment market indicators. But data that supports a banner headline on a newspaper front page has seldom been used sensibly.

What graduates actually do

The reason I picked on these careers is because of what LEO data tells us about graduate roles. The two most popular single industrial roles held by graduates a year after graduation in the 2023-24 tax year were “hospital activities” and “primary education”. As the years progress we add in “secondary education” and various public sector roles. Number three a year after graduation is what I actually did a year after graduation: a temporary agency role.

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I’ve really gone in deep with this one. You can filter by qualification subject and level at the top, and use highlighters to find careers of interest. The main chart area is actually four scatter plots, showing number of graduates on the y axis and median earnings on the x axis, with each dot signifying a standard industry code (SIC) at the full (five digit) resolution. You can use the purple filters at the bottom to explore differences by sex, prior (GCSE) attainment level, region of current residence, free school meals marker, and ethnicity – but you can only use one of these filters at once (the others must be set to total). The data is from the last release of LEO data back in June

A dive down into the deeper realms of the chart shows all the wild and wonderful things that graduates do get up to after gaining a qualification. You can make your own judgement as to which of these may be graduate jobs and may not be, but there are also some official definitions. The Office for National Statistics looks at whether large numbers of graduates currently do the role, and whether a profession is regulated by a professional body that requires a degree (and refreshes this periodically to account for changes over time). The Office for Students – as it tends to – has invented its own categorisation, which is whether or not the job sits in one of three occupational codes.

There are other people tracking graduate entry roles too. The Institute for Student Employers runs an annual recruitment survey, and last year called for nuance in interpreting the impact on new graduates of a job market that is tight overall. Prospects and the Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services (AGCAS) publishes an annual report on “What do graduates do?” the 2025-26 edition of which notes a slow unwind of the post-Covid labour market growth trend we have recently lived through: adding that

Most graduates got good jobs quite quickly in this cohort, and that will continue to be the case, although that does not mean it will be easy, and graduates will continue to need substantial support

Access to the professions

Against this, I would argue that “graduate only” roles are in decline. Many professional bodies now offer alternatives to traditional graduate routes: in law, for instance, the solicitors qualifying examination (SQE) is open to those without a degree (although you will need some relevant training or work experience in order to enter and pass the exam). Does this now mean that becoming a solicitor is not a “graduate job”? – no, but it is by no means the only profession that is becoming more open to appointing suitable candidates via alternative routes.

In the same way, many jobs and opportunities offered at many employers now look for a wider range of prior qualification and experience. The value of “graduate” as a simple label is becoming more complex: employers are more interested in what you can do than where you studied or what qualification you hold, and despite the fact that a degree adds a lot of value in the job market it is because of the qualities it imparts to a person. This can often lead to not mentioning a degree requirement up-front, though a de-facto requirement of a degree or comparable qualifications/experience will still be there in the person specification.

So, maybe not worry about “unprecedented numbers of graduates” and hardly any roles just yet. But as always, more data is always welcome: even when it prompts more questions and overturning some of our more stubborn assumptions about what graduates actually do.