In a few short weeks, tens of thousands of young people fresh from receiving their A-level and BTEC results will head off to university to begin their higher education journey.
Several years later, they will emerge as graduates, ready to enter the world of work.
Or at least, that’s the theory.
The reality is that many will leave university less prepared for the jobs market than they need to be, having spent years working towards a qualification without always being shown how to turn that qualification into a career.
That should concern all of us across education. Further education colleges and their staff often spend significant time helping young people progress, build confidence, develop practical skills and understand the world beyond education. There is some excellent employability practice in FE, although it is not consistent everywhere.
Yet when young people later enter the graduate jobs market, many still struggle to secure employment.
There are useful lessons here for higher education from some of the strongest FE practice. But this is not a simple case of one sector getting employability right and the other getting it wrong.
Where FE can offer useful lessons
At their best, FE colleges can be particularly well positioned to prepare young people for employment because of their close links with employers, vocational routes and work-based learning.
That is not to diminish the value of universities or degrees. A degree can provide knowledge, intellectual capability, subject expertise, independence and valuable experiences. Many universities also do excellent work on careers and employability. But academic success and getting hired are still two different things.
This is a distinction many parts of FE are used to working with very directly.
Because of its vocational links, much of the FE sector places strong emphasis on work-based learning, technical and practical skills, entrepreneurship and apprenticeships. Many colleges work closely with employers and recognise that preparing someone for employment means more than helping them pass an exam.
One of FE’s strengths, when it is done well, is the ability to connect learning with practical skills and a current understanding of the labour market.
But that kind of joined-up thinking is not yet consistent across either sector. Some universities embed employability extremely well from the start; others still leave too much of it to optional careers support or the final stages of a degree. The same variation exists across FE.
What matters is making the strongest practice the norm rather than the exception.
The graduate jobs market is fiercely competitive. According to the Institute of Student Employers, 1.2 million applications were submitted for just 17,000 UK graduate roles in 2023/24 – around 70 applications for every available position.
At the same time, graduate job postings fell by 33% in 2025, reaching their lowest level since 2018, according to the Institute for Employment Studies.
These figures sharpen the need for both FE and HE to keep adapting.
As a recruiter, I see the situation from the other side, and I’m sad to say that it is getting harder for young people to make that transition from education into employment.
I see capable, well-educated graduates reaching the jobs market without necessarily understanding some of the basics. That is not true of every graduate, nor is it a criticism of every university. But it happens often enough to matter.
They don’t always know how modern hiring works, how employers make decisions or where to find opportunities beyond repeatedly searching job boards.
They can struggle to identify what an employer is actually looking for, recognise their own transferable skills or turn academic, personal and work experience into meaningful evidence.
They may not know how to articulate the value they could bring to an organisation, build professional relationships and networks, use LinkedIn strategically, tailor a CV or application, or approach an interview from the employer’s perspective.
These are not minor gaps. In an incredibly competitive jobs market, they can be the difference between getting an interview and being rejected without ever getting through the door.
A new labour market needs a new approach
There is another challenge emerging, too: AI.
Many graduates are now having to navigate a recruitment landscape in which employers expect them to understand how to use artificial intelligence effectively, while also demonstrating that they can think independently and communicate in their own voice.
I’m increasingly seeing young people who don’t know how to use AI as a tool without allowing it to replace their own thinking.
That matters because the labour market they are entering is changing rapidly.
Many of the traditional graduate entry routes – administrative roles, junior analyst positions and entry-level marketing jobs, for example – are changing or disappearing. AI can now perform many of the tasks that were traditionally assigned to junior employees.
The students heading off to university this autumn will graduate into a fundamentally different labour market from the one their parents, teachers or careers advisers may have experienced.
We owe it to them to be honest about what that means.
Too many young people still reach the end of education knowing how to succeed academically but without a clear understanding of how hiring really works. They submit application after application and hear nothing back – not necessarily because they lack talent, but because they have not yet learned how to present that talent effectively to an employer.
That needs to change.
Universities have made significant investments in careers services and employability, and there are many examples of excellent practice across the sector. Some institutions embed employer engagement, placements, careers learning and professional development throughout the student experience.
But across both FE and HE, employability is strongest when it is built into the learning experience rather than sitting at the margins, waiting for people to seek it out when they are close to leaving.
For university students in particular, that preparation should begin early and continue throughout the undergraduate experience.
Students should be encouraged from their first year to understand how recruitment works, explore the careers their degree could lead to, recognise the transferable skills they are developing and gain meaningful experience alongside their studies.
They should leave university not only with a qualification, but with the confidence and practical knowledge to explain what that qualification means to an employer.
This is one area where higher education can usefully draw on some of FE’s strongest practice.
At its best, the FE sector recognises that education and employment cannot be treated as two separate worlds. Strong colleges and providers work hard to connect what happens in the classroom with what happens in the workplace.
The strongest university careers and employability teams are working towards the same goal – helping people develop the skills, confidence, resilience, networks and understanding to navigate a changing labour market throughout their working lives.
The challenge for both sectors is to make that approach more consistent, more visible and more closely connected to what employers are actually doing now.
Whether someone studies in FE or goes on to university, gaining a qualification is only part of the story. Education also needs to help them understand how to make something of it.
If we want graduates to succeed, we need to prepare them for the labour market they are actually entering – not the one that existed 20 years ago. FE has valuable experience to contribute to that conversation, particularly where employer links and vocational learning are strongest. But neither FE nor HE can claim the job is done. In this labour market, both need to keep learning from the best of each other.