A Job? In This Economy: A Student’s Perspective on The Future of the Job Market

Written by Hannah Christie

The summer I finished my GCSE’s was the summer I decided I would find my first job. It couldn’t be that difficult, I had a few friends with jobs, friends who were always employed. I thought that, like them, I would be a magnet for employers. My mother told me to walk into shops and ask them if they were hiring, to print out copies of my CV and give them to hiring managers or staff, to ask if there were any vacancies. Meanwhile my screentime was rapidly increasing with the amount of time I was spending on Indeed.com.

I applied for every job I could find for which I had the qualifications. It was rough. Assessment centres, tailored CV’s and nothing but rejection emails. Was getting hired today like finding a unicorn? Nearly impossible. It didn’t seem to be better in the ‘adult world’. When I got into sixth form the first talk we had was on getting into university, future careers and the importance of taking A - Levels seriously to make our lives easier in the future. In secondary school, we spoke about careers, but it was mostly centered around finding a career that makes you happy, diagnostic tests, discovering your personality type, if you’re an introvert or an extrovert. Sixth form introduced me to a new component of the working world, the competition. 

“The university you attend matters more than the course”, “How to stand out in job interviews”, “Mickey Mouse Degrees”, “The CV that got me offers at…”. I was entering a new universe, and I needed to make sense of it. I made my LinkedIn account, logging every single achievement. Academic Excellence certificates, networking events, insight days. I wasn’t always participating in these activities because I was interested in being a solicitor or accountant or working in tech, but because attending these insight days, summer schools and events would be accompanied by the shiny stamp of approval that was their logo under the experiences section on my LinkedIn profile. Adolescence was no longer an authentic search for passion or purpose, but a performance for the invisible recruiters on LinkedIn.

Now, I’m at university and the pressure is increasing. I see videos on social media about students applying to over 100 internships, attending assessment centres, cold emailing hiring managers, only to end up with a few job offers, if they get any at all. Conversations about ‘useful degrees’ and the purpose of humanities subjects linger throughout my feed and makes me wonder, ‘What will my job be when I graduate? How will I get one?’ The economy is growing more and more unstable, with unemployment for young people being at its highest for the first time in 12 years. It seems that employers want experience from the inexperienced and that leaves little room for opportunity for young people.

Questions arising about the purpose of degrees, is my degree worth it? How will I find a job as a humanities student when society is moving in a technologically innovative direction? How will this data affect the choices of students after myself? The truth is nothing is guaranteed, and whilst recent data shows that there is need for reform in the job market, it begs the question: what does that look like?