Sources: Milkround, Beyond the Buzzword Grad Insights, highfliers
Graduates and younger people have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, which increased applications for those still hiring.
Unemployment for recent graduates double from 6% in Q3 2019 to 12% in Q3 2020 (ONS). 53% of students or recent graduates believe the pandemic will negatively impact their future careers.
Many organisations put their graduate schemes on hold, COVID also made students re-think their plans, 11% plan to stay in education for longer than previously planned. 45% of graduates report that they’re not working in the industry they hoped to work in and 38% of students or recent graduates said that the pandemic has made them consider working in a different industry to one they had previously aspired to.
Which has led to those organisations still recruiting, seeing an unprecedented increase. On average, the country’s top employers received 41% more graduate job applications, compared with the equivalent period in the 2019-2020 recruitment round, the highest-ever annual increase recorded by this research.
38% of students worry that there won’t be jobs in the industry they were looking to work in due to the pandemic and 35% say that the industry they wanted to work in has been heavily impacted by the pandemic which has made 9% of them want to work in an industry that employs key workers. 21% choosing healthcare.
The largest recruiter of new graduates in 2021 will be the public sector, offering a record 5,400 entry-level places at organisations such as Police Now, Teach First and the Civil Service Fast Stream.
Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on students’ feelings at high school, undergraduate, and postgraduate levels
The impact of Mental Health has increasingly grown on individuals during the pandemic. Forbes looked at results of a careful assessment of over 13,000 students at high school, undergraduate, and postgraduate levels across 36 campuses over 8 subsequent weeks from the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The results indicate a general low energy level and dominance of negative feelings among the students regardless of their academic levels.
They have recorded 5 responses:anxious, stressed, overwhelmed, tired, and depressed - as the most frequently reported feelings in the time of lockdown.
Overall, 14% of those who have reported to suffer from these feelings have also identified a need for professional help in managing their feelings throughout the quarantine period.
Source: Forbes - The Outlook On The Job Market For College Grads In 2021 (forbes.com)
Sources: Milkround, Beyond the Buzzword Grad Insights
Our target audience is digital first, and Facebook and Instagram in particular are key channels to reach them.
LinkedIn is a key channel for Graduates when looking for a career.
Video content is at the heart of our young audience’s consumption. Looking at the frequency of consumption by platform, YouTube is still the number one globally (75% use daily and 92% use weekly). This is followed by Instagram (64%/78%), WhatsApp (60%/70%), Facebook (51%/66%) and TikTok (39%/53%).
EY is well represented across key graduate and apprentice sites which includes Prospects, Gradcracker, Graduate jobs, Target Jobs, and Milkround - commanding the majority share of traffic out of the big 4.
Source: Tabool / Nielsen; SimilarWeb; Research defines the moment of next
A third (34%) of those who started their first role remotely during 2020 have since moved to a different area to work, such as their family home.
Of those that have been living in a different area to their office, respondents’ biggest motivators include saving money (58%) and being closer to family and friends (44%). Furthermore, 41% said they moved due to concerns around the cost of living in a larger city, which suggests that remote working offers broader opportunities for those who cannot afford to live in more expensive cities, such as London.
When it comes to moving back to their office location, nearly four in ten (38%) who are currently living elsewhere report that they do not plan to move back to their initial location.
Looking ahead, for those graduates who have spent time working in 2020, nearly half (48%) would like to have the option to work remotely and in the office as they choose.
As a result, many organisations have responded to graduates’ increased desire for mobility. Almost four-fifths (78%) of HR decision makers have advertised graduate roles as working from a remote location over the last year. Amongst those, over seven in ten (71%) have noticed candidates applying from a range of locations beyond their immediate area.
Source: Milkround
Flexibility is key post-Covid-19
Despite the challenges of the last 12 months, EY appears to have maintained a strong profile across Accounting, Consulting and Finance.
Research taken from the Highfliers survey conducted on final-year student job hunters studying at 30 leading universities in the UK, carried out during October and November 2020 - back in 2018, 56% of the technology job hunters had some level of contact with EY. This has increased 79% this year. This the highest figure across all of the Big Four.
Almost two-fifths of the technology job hunters strongly agreed that EY was forward-thinking in terms of innovation and the use of technology.
Below are is some students on our virtual events, taken from the Highfliers report on students’ views and experiences of EY through a series of specially-commissioned online questionnaire research in early December 2020, for Job hunters who completed these were actively looking for graduate jobs in Accounting, Consulting and Finance.
Feedback from students on virtual events was generally very positive: “the virtual events have a lot of diversity and a range of degree disciplines /specialisations”
“videos on their website virtually represents a great diversity”
“they have removed all entry requirements from graduate applications regardless of background”
“they offer a variety of diversity and inclusion programmes and they provide the atmosphere that caters for everyone”
“they hold diversity and inclusion as one of their top values”
