Do postcodes influence graduate migration patterns?

To give graduates the best careers advice and plan recruitment campaigns it's important to understand how their background affects their behaviour

It's a commonly held belief that students attend the 'best' universities and seek out the 'best' graduate jobs, even if they have to relocate to find them. In this context, 'best' means the highest tariff requirements and the highest salaries, respectively.

This isn't true of the typical graduate - with 69% employed in the region they grew up - let alone for every subset of the university population.

However, only considering the 'typical graduate' isn't a good enough differentiator. Employers, recognising this, have made diversity their top-ranked challenge for 2018. In order to provide the best possible careers guidance, the advice given to graduates must adhere to these diversity categories. Therefore, we must ask how different university demographics behave.

One key - and often overlooked - differentiator is class. It is all too easy to say a recruitment strategy is diverse because you have X number of people who look a certain way. In reality, this recruitment strategy might not have cared about the colour of your skin, but it certainly cared about the way you spoke or how you tied your tie - or whether you were even wearing one.

While class is hard to pinpoint, we can look at where graduates grew up and use this as a proxy for class. With this in mind, let's consider how mobile graduates from different postcodes are.

What are graduates' migration patterns?

Every graduate can be divided into one of four categories based on their mobility patterns:

• Loyals - who stay home both to study and to work
• Stayers - who leave home to study and remain in that region to work
• Returners - who leave home to study and return home to work
• Incomers - who work outside of both their home region and region of study.

Migration ,Loyals,Stayers ,Returners,Incomers
1,55.2,11.8,20.4,12.6
2,51.9,12,21.7,14.5
3,48.6,12.3,23.5,15.6
4,43.2,13.4,24.7,18.7
5,37.3,13.4,27,22.3

Holding on to misconceptions around migration may lead to employers advertising jobs with insufficient incentives to attract graduates from different regions, and to setting unrealistic recruitment targets. Similarly, universities may advertise jobs and provide advice that won't be of use to the majority of their audience.

The importance of considering the data is highlighted in figure 1. There are four clear trends, one for each graduate migration category.

If a company from the South of England wants to hire graduates from low-participation areas and they can't find them locally, they will have a far harder time recruiting than they would if they wanted someone from a high-participation area.

Similarly, if careers advice is predominately centred on big businesses, due to them being by far the largest graduate recruiters, they may find that the advice they're providing is that graduates need to move to major cities - advice that may be falling on deaf ears.

Those seeking to attract or advise graduates need to pay close attention to two things:

• Where are these graduates from?
• Where did these graduates go to university relative to where they are from?

To put into perspective the importance of these two points, if you are from a low-participation neighbourhood and go to university in that region, there is a 90% chance that you remain in that region to find employment.

Written by

Michael Grove

Information analyst

Prospects