Source: Radio New Zealand
With youth unemployment three times higher than the overall unemployment rate, university graduates are struggling to find entry level work. 123RF
Three years minimum to set them up for a better career – and then new graduates discover there’s nothing out there for them, thanks to our soaring jobless numbers
Dubbed ‘the job wars’ by one TikTok user, graduates are struggling to secure entry-level work thanks to a tough labour market.
Figures released by Stats NZ in February showed that the unemployment rate for 15 to 24-year-olds was at 16.5 percent, three times higher than the overall unemployment rate.
On Saturday’sThe Detail, we look at the grim realities of the job market for graduates.
Justin Tuburan recently graduated from AUT with a bachelor of communications and is still struggling to find work in his field.
He’s been living off his casual job as a security guard and says the lack of direction is taking its toll.
“I don’t know really what I am doing with my life. I don’t have this full-time job that I can see career progression and the next 40 years of what I’ll be doing.”
Tuburan said that his current casual position wasn’t meant to form his main income.
“[During university] I was also getting student loan and living costs. That’s $300 a week that I was using to pay rent or pay for public transport… trying to get that money from a job that I used during uni that was only meant to supplement my living cost and now it’s my main source of income. It’s kinda rough trying to find the hours to pay for everything.
“I’m definitely asking my parents for money every once and a while.”
Happier times could be on the horizon though, said Seek’s senior economist, Dr Blair Chapman – but graduates may need to hold out a bit longer.
“It’s good news, the labour market is picking up, job ad growth is picking up. But it can take time for that to flow to graduates,” he said.
Chapman may be getting that vibe at his work, but figures out this week show the number of people receiving Jobseeker support has risen by 5700 to 223,500 since September.
Some reports suggest that AI is cutting graduate and entry-level positions, but Chapman said whether that’s true is still unclear.
“We have seen a dramatic increase in the demand for AI-related skills but it’s not obvious that is eating into the number of those jobs.”
Professor Catherine Moran, the deputy vice-chancellor and academic at the University of Canterbury, said one sector that wants students to be up-skilled in AI is law.
Their law school completed a survey with law practices across the country and asked if students needed to have skills in AI – 92 percent of them said ‘yes’.
But is going to university to learn these skills still worth it?
Moran said getting a degree is more than just learning information.
“There can be a sense that university is all about just book learning as compared to skills learning… It’s through a degree you get deeper and deeper understanding of content.
“You’re more challenged where you’re starting to bring a whole bunch of different ideas together.”
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
