‘It’s so demoralising’: UK graduates exasperated by high unemployment

It has been more than six months since Leah Savage, 24, started job hunting and despite applying for almost 100 jobs, she has had just two interviews in that time. “It’s so demoralising. All I do is wake up and apply for jobs. I reach out to different people and everyone says the same thing – they’re not hiring at the moment,” she said. “It’s a real struggle. I am lucky to be able to live at my parents’ house and I am on universal credit, but I can’t do stuff like go out with my friends because I just can’t afford to.” She has a first-class honours degree in marketing management and also did a one-year internship at Amazon during her studies, which she thought would give her a leg-up when applying for graduate roles. But the competition for work is fierce and there are now extra challenges such as ensuring your CV makes it past the AI filters companies employ to whittle down hundreds of applicants. “Sometimes it can be something as small as formatting which is not readable to AI and you’ve got no chance,” she said. “I can’t help but think what the point is of my degree that I spent four years working hard for, while balancing part-time work, if that isn’t enough to even get me a foot in the door?” Guardian analysis has shown that almost half of all jobs lost since Labour came to power were among the under-25s, and youth unemployment is running at 15.3%, the highest level outside the Covid pandemic since 2015. Across the board, young people including school leavers and graduates are reporting the battle to find work is harder than ever. Lee, who is 18 and has been looking for a job in Manchester for four months after finishing her A-levels, said the market was “a waste of time and very depressing”. “They ask you for experience that you can’t get without first having a job,” she said. “I am multilingual, I speak three languages, I have the competence and knowledge to do a good job, but I can’t even get an interview.” Miranda Alford, 22, described the entry-level job market as a “complete desert” which her university degree didn’t prepare her for. She said she felt very lucky to have secured a role as a receptionist, but it was only a temporary contract coming to an end next month, so the prospect of another job hunt is rapidly looming. “It’s just a constant conveyor belt of applications and getting nowhere. Last time I was looking, I got into a real slump about myself and believed I was a failure – I have so much to give but they didn’t want me,” she said. Alford lives in a house share in Nottingham, and has eaten into her savings in order to pay rent and bills while job hunting. “It’s really stressful. Entry-level jobs want multiple years of experience in that sector, for minimum pay, so it is very much a catch-22,” she said. “None of my friends who’ve graduated have found a job that pays well and they’re happy in, and a lot of them are unemployed and still looking.” Related: ‘A job is like finding a needle in a haystack’: how Dudley became centre of UK’s youth jobs crisis David Weston, 23, from Chesterfield, said it took about six months and more than 200 applications for him to find a job after graduating, and that was a role stacking shelves at a warehouse, which he only got after removing his politics degree from his CV. “I feel as if I have been told all throughout my education to study hard and get a degree, and then you are almost guaranteed a job. But that wasn’t the case,” he said. “I didn’t have any practical skills employers were looking for in roles related to my degree. And the lower wage roles I had done before now considered me too educated.” Chouka Tung, 24, had dreams of pursuing a dream in the media industry after moving from Hong Kong to the UK – but a year and a half after graduating from her journalism degree, she is working part-time in an Asian supermarket after receiving “rejection after rejection”. “The difference between reality and expectation can be quite unbearable,” she said. “I can only just pay my rent and I fear I am slowly becoming less proficient in my journalistic skills. I have no idea how I can get myself out of this limbo.”