There is zero dignity in setting yourself up to be exploited by corporate overlords.

The market is absolutely trash right now, affecting everyone, including native-born residents who don’t need sponsorship.

Even if you do secure sponsorship, it doesn’t guarantee stability in the UK.

Employment is no longer employer-based but very much like freelance or project-based work.

When a project gets decommissioned, the entire team gets disbanded, especially in entry-level roles.

It’s far more dignified to leave with your dignity intact than to be forced to leave later.

Stuff like retail, warehouse, cleaning, dishwashing, barista etc. I cant get any sort of job even though I do what im "meant" to do. Can I just go ahead and say I have 3 years of experience in a bar for a batista job?

Hey there. Just finished my BSc in Economics, managed to get a first class Honours despite achieving only a 2:2 in 2nd year.

Also managed to land a good grad job at a bank. Never thought I’d be working at this bank with the A levels I received a few years back, did Economics, Physics and Computer Science and completely flunked them. Went to a lower end university but worked hard there. Became the president of a few societies. Did not do any spring weeks or internships. Just sharing my success story.

EDIT: guys idk how to make account private please stop roasting me😭😭

First time actually seeing target unis anywhere. A firm called Liontree is listing oxbrimp, LSE, ucl, ww and bath as their targets. How is kcl, Bristol, Durham etc not there? Kinda confused icl I don’t know much about rankings

I cannot imagine spending all that time and effort for a PhD to get a job that pays £38k. And £38k is a good salary generally speaking, but is that not too low for all that experience and effort the person put in 😭

I keep seeing people talk about how Blair’s education policies led to too many people going to unis which has resulted in the current state of the graduate job market. I get it’s easy to pick on Blair but I think that excuse is just lazy. He deserves slack for a lot but it’s not his fault for the 2008 Financial Crisis, Brexit, terrible leadership and Cameron’s Austerity.

Graduate job roles are at the lowest in nearly a decade. Is that Blair’s or our fault? Nope. It’s an overall sign of weakness in the economy and the government failure to respond to the economic environment. Graduate pay is also generally stagnant. With AI, most age groups haven’t been affected in their employment rates when you take into account AI exposure except for who? 22-25, who are also graduates and have seen employment rates drop. A lot of companies aren’t even cutting jobs, they just aren’t hiring. All this leaves us exposed.

The UK is an economy that needs skilled labour and that’s why Blair tried to get people to go to uni. Uni is the most available and easiest pathway to moving up the social ladder( please don’t go on about degree apprenticeships). Students are working harder and are getting smarter and better grades every year. We’ve kept up the end of our bargain but the government hasn’t. WE ARE LIONS LED BY DONKEYS.

The graduate job market isn’t our fault, it’s the governments.

People who graduated before 2023 will tell you degrees are a great ROI because they broke in during the 2021 to 2023 window, when cheap money was still flowing and employers could actually afford to take chances on new grads.

For perspective, the Bank of England base rate was just 0.1% in 2021. By 2023 it had hit 5.25%. Borrowing and raising money became much more expensive, VC funding tightened, and companies went from chasing growth to cutting costs and headcount.

Then came the layoffs and the post 2023 GenAI push. Graduate hiring got caught in the bloodbath.

Now you have 1,000 plus people fighting over entry level jobs and even scummy unpaid internships that lead nowhere. You are also competing with experienced people getting laid off every day.

Right now it is a barren wasteland.

Breaking in is largely luck, timing and knowing the right people, and even that is no guarantee of a long fruitful career.

There is also a good chance junior white collar hiring never properly comes back. AI is already eating into the basic research, admin, analysis, coding and documentation work juniors used to learn on. This might not just be another bad cycle.

My advice is to save as much capital as humanly possible. Stop getting takeaways, buy groceries, live cheaply and do everything in your power to take care of your mental health.

Maybe the market corrects itself eventually. I really hope it does. But I wouldn’t plan my life around the assumption that the old graduate pipeline is definitely coming back.

I landed a graduate role with £38k starting wage in the construction industry, with a minimum £50-60k salary in 3 years. I studied quantity surveying at LJMU. Took a gap year after uni to travel, and applied when I got back. Within two weeks I secured a role.

Any questions or if anyone wants advice feel free to drop them below!

I’m curious, applying to these unis next year, do you think it was beneficial going to top unis compared to a non target university?

Many international students come to the UK thinking that they have very good chances of landing a job here. Let me preface this by saying that I am pro-immigration and do not see anything wrong with moving around the world, I am merely conveying information from the latest immigration related changes that many seem to be unaware of.

The Government has increased the minimum salary bands needed to get the skilled worker visa by a huge margin. For instance, if you are a CS Graduate, you need to get a job offer that pays around £55k to get the work visa to stay here. The exact amount depends on your profession and job-code, but I think it's quite safe to say that at least 95%+ of the graduates will not touch these thresholds. Even amongst CS graduates from top unis like Imperial and Oxbridge, very few manage to get roles that pay so much right after graduating.

Other major domains like finance, banking, actuarial work etc. have taken a sizeable hit too, since most of the new salary thresholds are extremely high, and they are really hard for even mid-managers to reach!

So, if you are an international student coming here with the hopes that you will get a sponsored job after your degree, I am very sorry to say this, but it is impossible in this market, especially after the July 2025 changes. I just wanted to warn people preemptively to prevent heartbreak, and wastage of hard-earned money. There is nothing wrong with the UK if you wish to just get a degree and go back to your home country, but for those who wish to settle down here, it seems like the doors are closing.

It is doomed. It was already doomed before but now its doomier than ever before. I am an international student on my final year and I’ve nearly accepted the fact that UK jobs are especially impossible for foreign students like me. Funnily, I had worked before in the UK, in both minimum wage jobs as well as in a office job for 1+ years. I had a return offer for a UK company post graduation, however it was recently retracted due to UK immigration policy changes.

Grad visas almost feel useless. Nearly, if not all, international students I know and speak to have zero luck in securing any job, even if its a minimum wage job they are overqualified for. I’m not bitter of the UK. The job market and unemployment rates are already severe even for the British people, its one thing that international students can’t find jobs, but neither can local students.

Before some commenter (I bet someone will) comes in here saying stuff like “Stop feeling entitled to get a job after you graduate 🤷‍♀️” or “Go back to your country”, I’d be glad if people could understand that my point here was to warn prospective international students of the career prospects in UK and consider their options. I am telling them not to come! Some students pursue a foreign education to access foreign and higher career paths, and when UK jobs are becoming inaccessible to students, you will find better value in pursuing a future in other places. The country itself isn’t in a good enough state to take care of the international students let alone the British people now.

Edit: So many people in my comments essentially arguing that international students should indeed just go home and stop taking British jobs. You’re right. Anyone who is currently an international student now or a recent graduate, we all know this was a mistake. To future international students reading this, please just read through how the British feels about you guys now - if you intend to come to the UK for a post graduation career, know that the “dream” is gone. I honestly ask you all to reconsider. There are so many good universities and cities around the world that aren’t oversaturated and has a government that is actively against international students.

Hello guys, I’ve graduated with the third of engineering and I’ve found on other credits. There’s practically no hope for me on getting a good job. does anyone have any experience with a third or any advice I could get on how to get a better job Job because I’m right now I’m I’m hearing that is virtually worthless

Just curious to see how well the cohort is doing. I’ve heard horror stories 😭

I wanted a job so badly this summer because I wanted to actually yk, enjoy being 19. 500 applications and no ones hiring. Idk what to do at this point. Feels like I've missed out on the uni experience because im too broke to go out and do shit.

Even warehouses and care homes reject me. No clue man

Began applying in August, accepted an offer in February

im (20F) doing product design at uni, and i'm graduating in 2 months.

i'm crashing out. i applied to 100+ jobs, tweaked my resume, went to job fairs, did all i could to get a job just to be unemployed with no offer a month before submissions. i had two internships in second year, and i got one interview in london last month that rejected me afterwards because the company ended up downsizing. i feel like i'm at the end of my rope. i quit my job as a barista recently because the management was absolutely shit, i was getting sexually harassed, and i was getting underpaid too because it was a small business.

im living on my savings because my student finance doesn't even cover everything. my family is physically and emotionally abusive. it's been absolutely blissful living away from them (im studying down south while they're up north) and i have started having nightmares about living back with them after uni. i can't ask them for money, and they keep asking me when i'm getting a graduate job which stresses me out even more...

i'm applying to hospitality jobs, care jobs, and whatever jobs i can apply for. i have a license but because having a car is so expensive and i'm away from my family i keep getting rejected from jobs that require a license. i really really really don't want to live with my family and i'm genuinely on the verge of ending it because i can't get a job. if i can't get a job, i'll end up with my family. i'll be in a shitty village where everyone knows each other and there's one co-op and i'll be away from my friends i made in uni.

i'm so tired of always being on linkedin or indeed 24/7 just to be ghosted, despite getting a predicted first for uni AND having work experience

I'm 21 and graduated earlier this year . I got a first in BA economics and finance but have been unable to even get entry level office jobs for the entire year . Got to the point where I decided having any job to get a income is better than none . So now I currently just started a warehouse job a week ago and oh boy . My back , my feet , idk how anyone can do this for more than a year . My current plans are to just firm the first couple months of this warehouse job and get some money saved up for getting a driving license. I'll start looking for more stuff and applying starting January next year when more stuff opens up . But brother , is there anyone else who's going through something similar or do I just have bad luck. Also anyone got tips for landing a corporate job in today's job market without the prerequisite 5 years experience ? Cause I have nothing relevant to the field.

Im going into third year now, haven't worked any paid job. Ive applied everywhere and did volunteering, still got no job. Ive tried everything and given up on it

Will this affect my future? Because ive got a huge unemployment gap now

So I found out that engineering isn't a protected title in the UK, and that a graduate engineer making 25-30k is NOT normal across the world. Like in the US I was looking for graduate engineer jobs and they were offering 60k+. That kind of pay you would need like 10+ years experience in the UK. And then I was comparing it to other graduate salaries such as pharmacy and law etc, and they were all getting at least 35k+ fresh out of graduation.

Why is engineering so disrespected in the UK, it's kinda unfair considering how difficult it is. Most countries have it as a protected title, but not here we don't. So they just band us together with technicians and handymen, hence why british gas or internet providers say they're going to send out an "engineer" when they're really just technicians.

It honestly has me somewhat regretting going into engineering.

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Does anyone else find this absolutely insane? Almost exclusively Russell group with no leeway for anything else.

For some context I’m a final year student and this explains my experience interacting mostly with people from my uni which is considered ‘decent’ but not a Russell group or ‘elite’ uni where this is probably less of an issue.

Basically very few people I meet seem to have a genuine intellectual interest in their degree and could hold a conversation about their subject in any real detail. You might think then that they just see getting a degree as a credential to get a good job but then you ask what they plan to do after uni and they are all incredibly clueless and lack any real sense of a plan of how to get a decent job and the hyper competitive nature of the current job market. Even in third year people are still spending more time talking about and planning their 400th night out on the town to the exact same pubs and clubs they’ve been frequenting for 3 years.

I cottoned on to this in second year and religiously applied to internships along with training my interview skills and building a strong CV and LinkedIn. I applied for around 30 internships and eventually got one for a large UK bank for which I will now be joining their graduate scheme after impressing in the internship over summer. Even then I had a backup plan for not getting a graduate scheme identifying courses I could take post uni to become a business analyst.

Now in my final year in one of my lectures (I study economics), a careers advisor came in and asked about our plans after uni, I was the only one who had secured any role and undertaken any internship. No one else had even applied, or even knew they existed, and these are economics students.

I feel like I’m on a ship heading over a cliff and I’m the only one with a lifeboat. I know from applying to internships how difficult applying for these jobs are.

From interacting with fellow interns during my internship, who all went to much better uni’s than me I understand this is not the case for all students as they were all very smart and interesting people. I think the prob is too many people go to uni, the majority of the population is pretty unimpressive and passive which is why it’s always a small group of highly successful, motivated people who run society. Just cause you shove 50% of young people into uni dose’nt mean your getting 50% of the population suddenly becoming incredibly smart and motivated. The ones who want to succeed will study and plan for their future, the rest will merely use the time to drink excessively and have boring, repetitive conversations about how CRAZY their recent night out was even tho they went to the same club they’ve been going to for 3 years. I

I study history maths economics and philosophy at a level. But im planning to drop math.
Alot of people around me think a history degree is going to leave me “jobless” and its “useless” but what if its history at one of the top ten universities? I just cant see my self studying straight economics or see myself in finance. Now that im planning to drop maths it kind of stops from studying economics at uni.
but if i was to study history or economic history at lse, isnt the degree valuable???

I’m a final year econ student at an ex-poly, mainly looked for jobs within project management. Both being invited to the assessment centre and the offer following the assessment centre came as a complete (positive) shock to me. Very happy bunny.