Graduate labour market update: vacancies, salaries and green jobs

Jisc's head of labour market intelligence, Charlie Ball, takes a look at the new Graduate Outcomes release, experimental datasets on vacancies and salaries, and fresh insights into employment in green jobs

As I'm sure everyone knows, we've had the first release of this year's Graduate Outcomes data, covering the outcomes of university leavers from the 2022/23 academic year 15 months after graduation (i.e. at the end of 2024).

It's very much in line with the overall picture I gave in my last update (which was before this data came out):

• The graduate labour market has weakened of late and so key outcomes metrics on employment, professional-level employment and unemployment have all moved in the wrong direction.
• It hasn't weakened a lot or dramatically, so they're all a bit rather than a lot down.
• Recent headlines about a serious deterioration in graduate prospects are overblown (it's noticeable that news outlets who have been apparently very interested in the graduate labour market based on single data points or anecdotes showed little to no interest in the actual official figures when they came out).

Overall, the data shows:

• The full-time employment rate for UK domiciled undergraduates is down from 61% to 59%.
• Unemployment went up to 6% from 5% (in actual fact much less than a whole percentage point rise due to rounding).
• The full-time further study rate was down a little, which is unusual when the labour market is apparently falling as it's usually counter-cyclical - it typically goes up as employment falls.
• There was a fall in the high-skilled employment rate for UK-domiciled undergraduates from 77% to 76%.

As yet, I don't have the full dataset, so haven't got a lot of the detail to work out exactly what is going on. But this is very much in line with the picture most of our data sources have been painting over the last few months: a general modest decline in hiring, with the autumn National Insurance increases probably one of, if not the, main causal factor along with the rise in the national minimum wage (less relevant for most graduates) and general global economic uncertainty. Of course, there'll be much more analysis of this data to come.

According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the estimated number of vacancies in the UK fell by 56,000 on the quarter, to 727,000 in April to June 2025.

• Total estimated vacancies were down by 143,000 in April to June 2025 from the level of a year ago, and 68,000 below their pre-coronavirus January to March 2020 level.
• The number of unemployed people per vacancy was 2.3 in March to May 2025. This is up from 2.0 in the previous quarter (December 2024 to February 2025).
• June saw increases in vacancies in manufacturing, public sector, professional services, the arts and health and social care but a particularly large drop in education vacancies (note this includes higher education).
• The number of payrolled employees has decreased for all regions and countries of the UK, except for Northern Ireland where it has increased by 0.5%, when comparing June 2025 with the same period the previous year.

Experimental data on vacancies can be found here, I've plotted the month-on-month percentage change by region between May and June (caution, experimental data, and also it's a bit depressing). It doesn't make very pretty reading - the biggest falls are in the Midlands, with the North less seriously affected at the moment.

Also new from the ONS, very interesting, highly experimental salary data from online job ads. This looks at salary data by a number of factors, but even down to occupational level. The ONS counsels that there is quite a bit of missing data here so you can't expect chapter and verse yet, but you can still track, for example, asking salaries across time for different occupations.

Chosen entirely at random, here's the median salary data for jobs ads for SOC 3572 which is - well I never - 'Careers advisers and vocational guidance specialists'. I'll leave it for readers to decide whether they like it or hate it.

Elsewhere in the data, all the best paid jobs are graduate jobs, of course, despite the rhetoric you might hear. It's only when you get down to the 33rd profession, the highly-skilled and in-demand rail and rolling stock builders and repairers, that you get to a job outside the professional classifications and, of the top 50 SOCs by salary, the only jobs not at professional level are that, and bricklayers.

At the other end of the scale, graduate-level jobs with median asking salaries below £30,000 in May 2025 are: fishery and forestry managers; HE teaching professionals (not a great look); youth workers; housing officers; elected officials (not sure how you advertise these); lab technicians; IT user support; graduate teaching assistants; early year and childcare professionals; merchandisers; sports players and (just under) journalists.

Meanwhile, lots of fun data abounds - my favourite is that salaries for dancers are higher than for plumbers and plasterers. This data will be refined a lot I suspect, but it already looks very useful.

Some readers will know I've done quite a bit of work in consultancy with institutions and the sector itself in the last year or so on green jobs (do drop me a line by the way if you'd like to talk about it). They're difficult to define properly, but the ONS have moved some of their previous work forward. The data is quite complex here, but the ONS have found that:

• UK employment in green jobs (SOCs classed as being 'green') was an estimated 690,900 full-time equivalents in 2023, up 34.6% on 2015, when it was 513,300 FTEs.
• Three activities within green industries (waste, energy efficient products group, and renewable energy) accounted for just over half (54.3%) of UK FTE employment in green jobs in 2023.
• Using the firm approach (which looks at industries by their level of greenhouse gas emissions), 12.5 million FTEs in the UK (46.0% of all FTEs) worked in the ten industries with the lowest levels of non-household residence-based greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in 2023 (4.4% of all such emissions).
• Around 4.3 million FTEs in the UK (15.8% of all FTEs) worked in the five industries with the highest level of non-household residence-based greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in 2023 (81.6% of all such emissions).

This is a very interesting area but the data can be difficult to interpret and can mean different things depending on whether you're talking about green jobs, green industries or green businesses, so I'll be keeping an eye on this data and to talk to people wanting to understand the data.

Meanwhile, the Recruitment & Employment Confederation (REC) and Lightcast have released their new Labour Market Tracker for June. They found:

• The number of new job postings in the UK in June 2025 was 757,594,  up by 6.2% from May 2025.
• This is behind the number measured a year ago (-2.6%), but some regions including London and the South East are showing higher numbers than last year.
• The overall number of active job postings in June 2025 was 1,485,542 - an increase of 4.5% on the number of job postings in May 2025.
• When comparing regions, London (8.1%) and the East Midlands (7.5%) showed the highest increase in the total number of job postings.

REC had previously reporting confidence returning to employers so this could be the start of a modest upturn In fortunes for the jobs market, but let's wait and see.

Adzuna are also reporting a similar picture of slight improvement though.

They report a modest rise in vacancies, up 2% on last month, and with vacancies rising across all regions (like REC, Adzuna report the largest rise in London). They report rises in hiring in construction, IT (a welcome reverse on recent trends), marketing (another reverse) and law, but a large fall in nursing and health, another data point in a growing picture of recruitment concerns for healthcare. They also show some very interesting data on how long it takes to fill jobs - IT, oil and gas, creative, PR, advertising and marketing and graduate roles take longest to fill and voluntary, admin, teaching and law the shortest.

Indeed, on the other hand, see the jobs market as 'cooling, but not crashing'. Looking at their data for both the UK and Ireland, there are signs of a very slight improvement in the last month, but the UK is below 2020 levels whilst Ireland remains healthily above it. The data comes from the excellent Indeed Hiring Lab Portal.

Written by

Charlie Ball

Head of labour market intelligence

Jisc