Did you apply for a full-time undergraduate course in 2005/06? If so, you are a member of the FUTURETRACK cohort. If you have already participated in this important independent survey conducted by a research team at Warwick University on behalf of the Higher Education Careers Services Unit (HECSU), you’ll know that it is investigating students’ progress through higher education and their experiences in the graduate labour market.

The Stage 4 questionnaire is now available, and existing participants have been sent an email inviting them to fill it in, so if this means YOU, check all your email accounts! All eligible respondents who complete the survey have the chance of winning cash prizes: ten of £1,000 or one hundred of £100. If you haven’t received it, or you are a 2005/06 applicant who would like to join the survey now, you can register here.

Please pass on the message to all your classmates with whom you are in contact, so that we can develop as full a picture as possible about the experiences of this ‘recession generation’ to inform policy and practice in higher education. You can find out more about Futuretrack here: http://go.warwick.ac.uk/futuretrack.

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The working paper on Job Search Strategies and Employment Preferences from the Futuretrack project is now up online!

We looked at the process of searching for post-graduation employment and examined the sources final year students used to look for this employment. We also looked at the motivations Futuretrackers gave for looking for particular types of employment. These included the characteristics of the employer they hoped to work for, as well as the content of the job itself, and the locations where they were willing to work.

Key findings include:

• Just over half of the final year Futuretrack students had started searching for employment at the time they completed the survey.
• Opportunities for promotion was the most important job attribute when students were considering what kind of job they would look for. Flexibility for work-life balance, long-term security and opportunities for further training were all more important to the Futuretrack students than a competitive salary.
• While the availability of employment was an important consideration for students when considering the locations where they might work, constraints such as needing to consider the needs of family members and the overall cost of living in an area placed particular constraints on certain groups within the Futuretrack cohort.

Read the full paper here.

http://go.warwick.ac.uk/futuretrack/findings/ft3.1_wp2_job_search_and_motivations.pdf

What’s really happening in the UK graduate labour market? Our article on Warwick Knowledge reviews some of the recent work that the IER and Futuretrack have been doing to answer some of the issues debated in the media.

 http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/knowledge/culture/graduateemployability