In an increasingly competitive youth labour market, young people's early labour market experience has become progressively more protracted, unstable and fragmented. Between education and employment, unwaged work, temporary work and involuntary part-time work have become a more common for job-seekers, whatever their qualifications. As employers demand evidence of 'employability skills', work placements and internships have become an integral part of secondary and higher education and of early labour market experience.

In Futuretrack, we identified the increasing importance of unpaid work, temporary work, work experience placements during courses and after graduation, in students' and graduates' pursuit of career opportunities and the 'employability skills' that graduate employers seek when recruiting. In this major new ESRC-funded project, we are following up a sample of Futuretrack graduates who had experience of these forms of unpaid work and 'precarious employment', also tracking the experiences of young people who did not enter HE, and investigating the perspectives of employers, in an intensive study of employement opportunities in the Midlands in current and recent years. Members of the research team are also comparing young people's transitions from education to employment during previous periods of recession and comapring these, and the policies and practices that facilitated or obstructed then in their job-seeking, with those of young people today. See www.warwick.ac.uk/paths2work for more information.

A small follow-up research project, funded by the Society for Research into Higher Education, eanbled Drs. Heike Behle and Charoula Tzanakou to undertake secondary data analysis of the existing Futuretrack survey data set and conduct additional interviews with a sub-sample of European mobile graduates (EMGs) to answer the research question: Under which circumstances is the production of knowledge in UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) transferable within the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) in terms of integration into the labour market or further training?

The research aims to: (i) Develop further knowledge of the motivations behind the migration of EMGs, (ii) Map the career development of EMGs of UK HEIs and assess the opportunities and challenges faced by them in accessing the labour market and further study, (iii) Assess the extent to which a gap exists between demand for different employability skills and the development of these skills by EMGs of UK HEIs.

The project was funded between 01/01/2013 - 31/10/2013

For further information, contact Dr Heike Behkle; heike.behle@warwick.ac.uk

Futuretrack Stage 4: transitions into employment, further study and other outcomes (2012)

The Stage 4 research report examines graduates' experiences of the labour market and further study five and a half years after they first applied to higher education.