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Friday, 12 March 2010 07:57 |
The employment of UK graduates: comparisons with Europe - John Brennan and Winnie Tang - REFLEX Report to HEFCE No 1, Bristol, 2008
Executive summary: This report is one of a series of six reports commissioned by the Higher Education Funding Council for England which draw on a recent European Commission Framework project, ‘The Flexible Professional in the Knowledge Society’ (the REFLEX project). The project – undertaken in 11 European countries – was an investigation into the employment experiences of European graduates over the five years since graduation in 2000. By design, the UK sample comprised graduates who had completed a bachelors degree in 2000. In most of the other countries, the samples comprised wholly (or mainly) those with a masters degree.
Like graduates across Europe, the vast majority of UK graduates five years after graduation were in full-time employment. Since graduation, they had had an average of 2.6 employers, spent an average of 6.4 months on training or courses and 4.9 months in ‘informal’ job-related learning. One-third of them had experienced a period of unemployment – on average 6.3 months – since graduation.
While in some respects graduates from UK higher education were similar to their European counterparts, in others they revealed a distinctive profile of characteristics. They were both more likely to feel ‘overqualified’ for their jobs and less ‘well prepared' to undertake them, receiving more employer-supported training and more supervision. Particularly in relation to their first jobs after graduation, UK graduates were more likely to believe that they did not require the possession of a degree and that their undergraduate study programmes had not provided them with a good basis for starting work. However, five years on the percentage believing their highest level of education matched their job requirements was near the European average, and UK and European average salaries were also comparable.
A longstanding feature of UK higher education has been its ‘looseness of fit’ with the labour market. In the present study, 35% of UK graduates were in jobs which required no particular subject of study. In the European sample as a whole, the equivalent figure was 13%. Arguably, this results in both a lower level of preparedness for graduates’ first jobs after graduation and a higher level of flexibility in terms of the range of jobs available to any particular graduate. Other distinctive features – compared with the rest of Europe – include the relatively short time spent in higher education, the lower level of qualifications acquired, the less vocational nature of the subjects studied, and the relative lack of work placements or internships.
Students in other parts of Europe spend more years in higher education and are significantly older when they graduate than those UK graduates who entered higher education straight from school. While for many UK students a period of academic study is followed after graduation by work experience and work-related training, for students elsewhere in Europe these experiences are combined within the traditionally longer first degree. Five years after graduation, UK and other European graduates may have reached roughly the same level of work proficiency, but they have got there by somewhat different routes and higher education’s role in the preparation for work has been rather different.
Full text report: PDF (1.3 MB) |
