Exploring students’ and graduates’ attitudes to the process of transition to the labour market

Abstract

This article explores how UK students and recent graduates experience the process of transitioning to the labour market, based on a secondary analysis of 1969 survey responses from current students and recent graduates using an online jobs board. It finds that gender, class and ethnicity all structure students’ experience of transition in a multitude of ways. The article reports 24 aspects of the transition process with statistically significant differences between students from different demographic backgrounds. These include students’ vocational focus and career aspirations, mobility, values, the social aspects of work, whether they feel informed about career and recruitment, how they want to communicate with employers, and their experience of the Covid-19 pandemic. Most of these differences are small, but cumulatively they suggest that demographics are shaping the process of transition in complex, intersectional and heterogeneous ways. There is a need for key stakeholders involved in this process, notably higher education careers services and employers, to attend to these differences and use them to reform the graduate transition process in ways that make it more equitable.