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JapanWith youth unemployment remaining at near record levels many university students graduating in the coming months will face a slew of challenges unique to their generation.
The latest unemployment figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that under-25s are hardest hit by Britain's depressed job market. The number of people aged between 16 and 24 who were out of work hit 963,000 in the three months to February. This pushed Britain's youth unemployment rate up by 0.1 per cent to 20.4 per cent.
The problem is compounded as those collecting degrees are also competing with recent graduates from 2008, 2009 and 2010 who still lack steady work. So what steps can this summer's university leavers take to ease their transition into a turbulent job market, IBTimes UK investigates.
Choosing the right career
After three years of being told to follow their dreams and passions at university; today's graduates will find that their early years in the job market, are "the most important for signaling" one's career potential to employers, according to Lisa Kahn, an economist at Yale University.
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"All you've got is college first, so there's a lot of room for employers to form impressions. After a few years and a few jobs, those impressions solidify and it's harder to change them," she told the National Journal.
With jobs so scarce, many graduates are forced to take low-level, low-prospect jobs that can create an "impression of underachievement that may be hard to shed".
There is a danger that taking on too many low-status jobs in a short time frame after graduation can become cyclical. Don Peck, writing in the National Journal earlier this year, listed the challenges facing graduates in today's job market and warned them to get serious about a career sooner rather than later. "The window for getting onto a good track, arguably, is narrower than it used to be," he said.
The longer that graduates spend exploring different career paths in their 20s, the harder it becomes to change career five or ten years down the line, he said.
"Earnings tend to grow much more [quickly] early in one's career than later," noted Princeton University economist Henry Farber.
One prominent study shows that, adjusting for inflation, about two-thirds of all lifetime income growth occurs in the first 10 years of a career, when people can switch jobs easily, building up their earnings.
People who can't immediately step onto a desirable career curve due to a bad economy have a much harder time doing so later, when mortgages and marriages have made them less mobile, and when many employers will frown upon a disappointing C.V.
Even an eventual return to boom times won't change that, Farber explains. "If you happen to have the bad draw early on and the good draw later, it's going to be hard to fully recover."
David Brooks, writing in the New York Times, went even further arguing that it is indicative of this 'perversely structured' generation that pursuing one's dreams should be so greatly sought after.
