UK GRADUATE JOB ADS DOWN 45.6% IN A YEAR

🔴 8,383. That is the average number of live graduate job vacancies across the entire UK in July.

Business Insider reports, citing the latest UK Job Market Report from job-matching platform Adzuna, that graduate postings fell 45.6% year over year. It is the lowest reading since Adzuna launched the monthly series in April 2016.

The scale of the drop is the part worth sitting with. At its mid-2017 peak, the same index tracked more than 55,000 graduate vacancies. Adzuna aggregates listings from more than 1,000 sources.

📉 The broader entry-level category fell 8.1% year over year. Vacancies declined across the market overall, and competition for each opening rose.

"July's numbers are a step backwards, not a blip," Adzuna cofounder Andrew Hunter said in a press release, adding that employers "still haven't found a reason to open up hiring at that level."

Indeed's data points the same direction, less sharply. Postings with "graduate" in the title were down about 7% year over year as of July 10, their lowest for that point in the year since 2020.

According to Business Insider, the squeeze is more than one problem: a sluggish economy, higher costs, uncertainty, and AI absorbing the routine work once handed to junior staff.

‼️ A PwC analysis of more than 1 billion job ads globally found US entry-level roles exposed to AI were seven times more likely to require traditionally senior-level skills than comparable roles in 2019.

Companies are splitting. EY stretched an eight-week internship into a yearlong residency. PwC's UK arm cut its graduate intake, citing economic weakness, AI and offshoring. IBM and LinkedIn are expanding early-career engineering programmes instead.

If a junior hire no longer does junior work, what exactly is the first job now?

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