How are universities supporting career-ready graduates?

Going to university delivers agency for individuals and kick starts their career. This includes equipping graduates with skills needed and valued by employers, it could also include supporting individual entrepreneurship and business creation. For individuals, this means that university can act as a gateway to a fulfilling lifelong career. For the UK, harnessing the power of graduate skills drives productivity and growth across the country. 

The data bears this out: graduate outcomes data shows for those graduating in 2021/22, 15 months after graduation 83% of respondents were in employment or unpaid work. The majority of graduates were in full-time employment (61%), with 11% of graduates being engaged in part-time employment and 10% in employment and further study. Graduates also earn more than non-graduates who had the right qualifications to go to university but chose not to, as UUK analysis shows that by age 31, on average graduates earn around a third more (32- 37%) than non-graduates who could have gone to university across all regions of England.

However, this isn’t the case for everyone. For the 2021/22 cohort, 5% of UK-domiciled graduates were unemployed 15 months after graduation. For students from disadvantaged backgrounds, they are more likely to struggle to find work after graduation. One year after finishing their studies, 83.1% of students who had been eligible for free school meals (FSM) were in sustained employment, further study or both compared to 87.7% of their non-FSM peers. They are also likely not to earn as much as their more privileged graduate peers, as the gap in earnings between graduates with FSM and non-FSM increases, from £1,900 to £2,900, in the first five years after graduation. Other student groups also experience greater difficulty in finding graduate employment than others. For example, AGCAS research shows that there was a disability employment gap of 4.0% for first degree graduates from the 2021/22 cohort. 

Yet we know that more graduate skills are needed to improve productivity and drive inclusive growth across the UK, particularly in growth sectors that are critical to the government’s industrial strategy such as creative industries, defence and the energy industry. It is therefore important not only to widen access to higher education to increase the number of graduates in the country, but also to ensure they are supported in finding a job after graduation that makes the most of their skills – and this is a key focus for universities. 

Universities are already doing great work to prepare their students for the world of work. They collaborate with employers to co-design curricula to ensure students develop relevant skills for the workplace, help students to explore careers that make the most of their interests and skills, and support them to make the first steps in finding work with job application advice and guidance.

University of Southampton’s Successful Futures (SF) programme prepares students for career success by empowering them to identify, develop, reflect on and articulate their employability and enterprise skills. 

While most universities identify a broad set of skills, encouraging their graduates to achieve them all, Southampton takes a different approach - starting from a career idea, however vague, and supporting students to identify only the skills relevant for that career path. 

By linking directly to current career ideas, the programme makes skills acquisition more relevant, reduces fear of ‘wrong’ choices and reassures students they can change their minds multiple times, simply reconsidering which skills they need for each new career idea. The programme was launched to students in November 2024, with 825 students having completed it so far and widespread in-curriculum completion planned for 2025. 

However, while inequalities persist in graduate outcomes and with an increasing need for the UK to make the most of the skills in the population to drive growth, more work remains to be done to ensure that all students leave university as career-ready graduates.  

With a fast pace of technological change and changing skills needs, universities can use the shared understanding of skills needs established by Skills England to ensure their processes are agile whilst continuing to protect quality and standards. We want to work with universities to level the playing field for all students and ensure that degrees equip learners with skills to fulfil the workforce needs of today as well as the future.  

UUK’s Access to Success action plan sets out how universities can ensure that all students graduate equipped with the skills needed to flourish in the workplace. There are several actions that universities can take to achieve this:

Universities can further build on existing efforts to support their graduates into work after study, ensuring that all graduates and employers are able to make the best use of higher-level skills developed through higher education.