This month, thousands of young people across the UK will graduate. Standing for hours in the heat, wrapped in heavy gowns, sweating through the final ritual of university life to exalt in the freedom of no longer being a student. Families will cheer, photos will be taken and certificates held high – it’s a day for celebration.
But look a little closer and behind the smiles there’s something else: uncertainty. For many the next chapter isn’t a job but unemployment.
Graduates in the UK now face the toughest job market for years. Employers are hitting pause on hiring, entry-level roles are being cut, internship places are fewer than ever and the prospect looms of competing against thousands of others for any kind of graduate scheme.
For the cohort of 2025, the real test begins now. This week the hiring company Adzuna reported that vacancies for all junior jobs – graduate roles, apprenticeships, internships and those with no degree requirement – have dropped 32 per cent in the UK since 2022.
Part of the reason is clearly the Labour Government’s increase in employer National Insurance tax and in the minimum wage. But many point to a more insidious cause: an AI-driven apocalypse in graduate jobs.
Adzuna links this fall in vacancies to the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 and the subsequent proliferation of AI in the workplace.
Graduates looking for work are no longer just competing in a saturated job market, they must also now outperform machines, making the prospect of securing employment more uncertain than ever.
Graduates in the UK now face the toughest job market for years
Graduates looking for work are no longer just competing in a saturated job market, they must also now outperform machines
Figures from the jobs search site Indeed last week revealed a 33 per cent drop in graduate job postings compared to 2024.
Jack Kennedy, a senior economist at Indeed, says: ‘There are signs that entry-level roles in some professional sectors are being squeezed and part of that could be down to AI reshaping how certain tasks are performed.
‘While AI isn’t replacing all roles outright, it is changing them – and that can reduce the number of opportunities available to graduates who might previously have started in those functions.’
Analysis suggests that AI is cannibalising low-level ‘white collar’ jobs most of all. In knowledge-intensive industries, trainees often begin with menial activities such as making slideshows in management consultancy or proof-reading documents as a junior solicitor, tasks that are now easily automated.
As Mr Kennedy notes: ‘Graduate job postings are now at an eight-year low and the steepest declines have been in professional sectors like HR (down 62 per cent) and accounting (down 44 per cent).
‘These sectors have been seen to be more exposed to AI-driven change and shifts in employer focus, with businesses increasingly prioritising experienced hires over investing in early-career talent.’
This abandonment of a generation left adrift in the job market is being felt nationwide, as graduates describe the toll of a seemingly ‘neverending’ and ‘tiresome’ job search that could take months or even years.
Anna, 25, was doing a classics degree but knew a career in the subject would be unlikely to pay the rent on a flat in London, so she thought she would follow it with a law conversion course, hoping to find a legal firm to sponsor her.
She spent her final university year applying to solicitors’ firms for training contracts and graduate schemes, compiling a spreadsheet of more than 50 applications while earning a 2:1 degree.
‘I didn’t get a single one’, she said. ‘So I decided to pay for my own law conversion since everyone else said becoming a solicitor was the safest bet for employment. Oh, how wrong I was.’
Like thousands of other graduates, Anna embarked on her conversion course while continuing to apply to law firms for training contracts and any other work.
With no salary and without the maintenance loans provided by big law companies to their trainees, she was soon more than £10,000 in debt.
And yet, after the year-long course, she emerged after rounds of interviews with not a single job offer.
Anna continued down the path of specialisation, deciding to qualify as a solicitor: She had gone too far to give up. Living at home with her parents, she started studying for the Solicitors Qualifying Exam (SQE), applying for the same firms for a third time – but also for a variety of other jobs in the legal profession.
‘I got desperate, the studying was hell and I just about scraped by financially. And now – still nothing,’ she says.
Anna passed her SQE and is now facing a third summer of unemployment. ‘The worst part in all this is the fact that the first year of work I would be doing could be done anyway by an AI chatbot – and probably is,’ she says.
In knowledge-intensive industries, trainees often begin with menial activities such as making slideshows in management consultancy or proof-reading documents as a junior solicitor, tasks that are now easily automated
Figures from the jobs search site Indeed last week revealed a 33 per cent drop in graduate job postings compared to 2024
One barrister, a KC, spoke anonymously on the subject, confirming Anna’s worst fears: ‘AI is already having a huge impact on the legal profession, particularly at the junior or graduate end of new recruits.
‘Most big solicitors firms are investing enormous sums in AI and have started using it to carry out junior level tasks such as research and drafting emails, plus first drafts of letters.
‘The pace of change is spectacular. It is going to mean a fundamental shift in how law firms operate and the number of people they recruit. So much of what junior lawyers do is bread and butter for AI which can do it more quickly and at a fraction of the cost.’
He adds: ‘The days of vast starting salaries for graduates just out of university may soon be over.’
Business leaders and analysts nationwide say the same.
Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of AI development company Anthropic, has warned that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level office jobs in the next five years, pushing up unemployment by 10 to 20 per cent.
BT’s chief executive Allison Kirkby, said last month that advances in AI would lead to even deeper jobs cuts at the telecoms company, which already planned to shed up to 55,000 workers.
‘Depending on what we learn from AI… there may be an opportunity for BT to be even smaller by the end of the decade,’ she told the Financial Times.
LinkedIn’s chief economic opportunity officer Aneesh Raman says that AI is increasingly threatening the type of entry-level jobs that traditionally served as stepping stones for young workers.
Mr Raman cites a recent survey of more than 3,000 executives at vice president level or higher on LinkedIn.
He says that ‘63 per cent agreed that AI will eventually take on some of the mundane tasks currently allocated to their entry-level employees’.
He added in a recent article in the New York Times: ‘Virtually all jobs will experience some impacts but office jobs are expected to feel the biggest crunch: our research suggests that professionals with more advanced degrees are more likely to see their jobs disrupted than those without.’
This is perhaps the most surprising consequence of the shift to AI – the effect on sectors requiring higher education degrees.
Until recently, the ‘graduate satisfaction gap’ – or the ‘university wage premium’ – showed that graduates earned significantly more than non-graduates. In 2013, female graduates aged 21 to 30 earned about 40 per cent more than non-graduates.
But by 2023, this gap had narrowed to less than 23 per cent, or about £5,500 a year.
For male graduates, the premium shrank from 35 to 27 per cent, or £7,500.
Now, the most likely to be hardest hit are those who ironically may have used AI chatbots throughout their university years for their CVs and in applications for jobs they presumed would be stable and financially lucrative.
Each morning I wake up to trawl through LinkedIn job adverts, the Indeed job search site or even the Government website only to face the pain of doing it again tomorrow
The pollster James Kanagasooriam points out the areas most likely to be hardest hit by the AI jobs revolution are: ‘Richmond Park, Highgate & Hampstead, Cities of London and Westminster, Battersea and Wimbledon. Britain’s leafy, Remain-heavy, high-income London boroughs.’ Meanwhile, those areas with the lowest risk of automation and the least likelihood of jobs being affected are ‘places like Boston [Lincolnshire] Great Grimsby, Stoke Central, Hull and Tipton’.
It is unsurprising that the accountancy sector has been one of the hardest hit in new employee recruitment. Major accountancy firms such as Deloitte, EY and PwC are reportedly turning to AI to automate the work of junior employees.
KPMG, the smallest of the ‘Big Four’ accountancy companies, has reduced its graduate trainee scheme by 29 per cent, slashing intake from 1,399 in 2023 to just 942 last year.
Similarly, Deloitte cut its graduate cohort by 18 per cent, and EY reduced its graduate hiring by 11 per cent.
James, 26, has been applying for jobs for more than ten months since his two-year master’s degree in accounting and finance ended.
‘It gets disheartening,’ he says. ‘Each morning I wake up to trawl through LinkedIn job adverts, the Indeed job search site or even the Government website only to face the pain of doing it again tomorrow.’
James says he decided to do a ‘panic master’s’, hoping the job market might have finally shaken off the effects of the Covid pandemic when he emerged from education. ‘But I can’t seem to get any kind of job,’ he says.
‘Even in “entry level” job applications, you scroll down and they require three years of experience and already have 300 applicants – I don’t even stand out for having a master’s degree.’
The creative industries are also under threat. Lucas, 25, who completed a degree in public health and a master’s in broadcast journalism, has spent a year applying for jobs.
‘I feel that with the amount I have applied for, I should have a job by now,’ he says.
‘You feel as if you lose all agency over where you are going with your life. After applying for 50 jobs and getting rejected or hearing nothing back, you start to doubt yourself.’
The demand for jobs from graduates is huge: on average, employers were receiving 86 applications for each graduate vacancy in 2023, up 23 per cent on the previous year, according to a report by the Institute for Student Employers.
‘On a more societal level,’ Lucas adds, ‘I do think there is something wrong.
‘It is strange how so many people are having this issue where you go to school and university, get a bachelor’s and master’s degree – and then you just can’t get a job.’
Baroness Kidron, a campaigner for the creative industries against AI, says: ‘It is heartbreaking to talk to young people who are confused and scared by the prospect of their creativity being replaced by AI.’
‘I believe that the relentlessly optimistic language of government in uncritically accepting big tech promises about AI will be powerfully undermined when the public starts to understand the level of job displacement to AI.
‘It is a technology with extraordinary potential but if you don’t put people and country first, it will capture jobs, undermine the economy and be a detriment to our values.’
As the job market becomes increasingly dominated by machines and employers turn to automation to cut costs, the future for young graduates is looking bleaker than ever.
What was once a clear path to success – a university degree and a graduate job – is now shrouded in uncertainty.
For young workers, the future may no longer be defined by perseverance alone but by their ability to adapt to an evolving landscape as AI continues to reshape entire industries.
But the question remains: can society balance technological progress with the well-being of young, enthusiastic workers – before we leave a generation behind?
