The Gen Z job crisis is real: 1.2 million recent grads in the U.K. competed for just 17,000 open roles

“There are now many more graduates graduating from universities, which means there are more people necessarily graduating for the jobs out there,” Rob Brier, chief executive of the UK independent school system Malvern International College, said on stage recently. Luck Global Forum Conference.

“I saw a rather shocking statistic in the UK earlier this week,” Brier continued, referring to the Institute of Student Employers (ISE) statistic that 1.2 million applications were submitted for 17,000 graduate jobs in the UK alone in 2023/24. That discouraging number “starts to give you an idea of ​​how competitive that market has become,” he said.

In comparison, 559,959 applicants were interviewed for graduate roles in 2021/2022, of whom UK employers recruited 19,646. The slightly older group of Generation Z enjoyed thousands of open roles and half the competition their peers face today.

Last year saw the highest number of applications per job ever recorded since ISE began tracking the data in 1991. It perfectly captures the dismal state of the job search: thousands of applicants apply to a single job, candidates spend years trawling job sites, and recent graduates are locked out of entry-level jobs. The United States feels this too.

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Job prospects are so bleak that Generation Z will go straight from throwing away their graduation caps to years of torment with no luck. As of last July, 58% of students who finished college in the past year were still trying to find stable work, compared to 25% of Millennials and Generation X who faced the same predicament. A fifth of job seekers have been searching for a year.

Generation Z’s employment opportunities in the most promising, high-growth cities and industries in the United States don’t look better. New York City, one of the largest and most active employment centers in the United States, added less than a thousand private sector jobs in the first half of this year. Before the pandemic, the Big Apple was adding roughly 100,000 jobs a year. The highly lucrative tech sector in the United States — which includes trillion-dollar giants like Meta and Nvidia — is also pushing Generation Z to the side. The proportion of workers between the ages of 21 and 25 has halved at public technology companies since 2023, falling from 15% to 6.8% by August of this year.

Struggling with a lack of career opportunities, Generation Z is questioning the value of expensive college degrees that once promised them six-figure jobs. CEOs and experts have criticized universities for failing to keep up with the times; Now that AI is here to stay, students had better be prepared to leverage it in their roles. Most colleges have struggled to keep up with the rapid pace of AI innovation, but the chief executive of Malvern College says schools are finally starting to wake up.

“With artificial intelligence, many graduate jobs are changing or becoming more difficult for people to get into,” Briere continued. “So what we’re starting to see is that they’re looking to their universities and educational programs to give them that jump start to thriving as they get out and into life.”