Job hunting has a peculiar ability to make even the most capable person feel completely unemployable.
After finishing my master’s degree, I spent months applying for everything from journalism to communications, marketing, PR and sales.
In the end I was incredibly fortunate to pick up shifts at The Irish News, but it would be another year before a permanent position became available.
My own route into graduate employment was far from straightforward. Unfortunately it does not appear to have become any easier for those graduating today. In fact the competition facing them may be greater than ever.
A recent BBC report warned of a potential “lost generation”, with more than one million people under the age of 24 currently neither working nor taking part in education or training.
Among those featured was Eloise, a 24-year-old with a first-class undergraduate degree and a master’s degree in English and creative writing.
Despite volunteering, gaining work experience and earning two degrees, she had secured just four interviews and was working in hospitality because she could not find employment related to her qualifications.
One supposedly entry-level position rejected her because she needed more experience.
Therein lies the maddening Catch-22 facing graduates. They need experience to secure their first opportunity, but cannot acquire that experience unless somebody is prepared to give them one.
Even the fall-back jobs that graduates are so often told they should accept are not necessarily easy to obtain.
(Alamy Stock Photo)
Another young man featured by the BBC described himself as trapped between being considered overqualified for jobs as a cleaner, barista, waiter or hotel receptionist, and underqualified for the career he actually wanted to pursue.
This is not simply a feeling shared by a few particularly unlucky jobseekers.
Ulster University’s 2025 Graduate Employer Survey identified a slowdown in Northern Ireland’s graduate labour market and found that competition among students was the stiffest on record.
Although 45% of employers expected to increase their graduate intake over the following year, that was down from 62% in the equivalent 2022 survey.
Meanwhile, 90% said work experience was important when selecting graduates.
Experience has always mattered. A degree alone should not automatically entitle somebody to walk into their dream job and employers cannot be blamed for choosing the strongest candidate.
However, something has gone badly wrong when young people can follow all the advice they have been given, leave university with good qualifications and relevant experience, apply repeatedly, and still struggle to secure an interview.
They are told to tailor every application, undertake unpaid work, build a portfolio, network, acquire new skills and remain resilient through rejection after rejection.
Eventually resilience begins to look an awful lot like banging your head against a locked door.
We frequently hear about the importance of retaining talented young people in Northern Ireland. Yet we cannot endlessly praise their potential while offering too few meaningful routes into the industries in which they trained.
Nor can we complain about a generation supposedly unwilling to work when so many are spending hours completing applications that employers do not even acknowledge.
Not every graduate will immediately find a permanent job in their chosen field. Careers rarely unfold that neatly, but somebody has to be willing to provide the first rung of the ladder.
Otherwise we should hardly be surprised when talented young people conclude that their best chance of building a future lies somewhere other than here.
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