Young people who graduated with a baccalaureate+5 had more difficulties in 2024 accessing the labor market than in previous years, a situation that risks getting even worse in 2025, warns the Association for the Employment of Executives (Apec) in a study published on Tuesday.
Among young people who finished their studies in 2023, 72% had paid employment in June 2024, 12 months after obtaining their degree, that is, two points less than the previous promotion and three less than in 2021, this study highlights. However, this rate does not reach the 69% floor recorded for the class of 2020, during the Covid crisis.
Long search times, multitude of applications: for young master’s graduates, “the job search at the beginning of their career has become considerably more complex,” the study notes. Most of the Class of 2024 who found jobs (57%) had to apply more than 30 times before landing their current position, compared to 31% of the Class of 2022.
More and more young graduates say they have a “food job”
Faced with these difficulties, young graduates often have to make important concessions compared to their initial expectations. If 78% of them consider it “quite important” or “very important” to have a permanent contract or to be a civil servant, 70% nevertheless declare that they would have been willing to accept a contract other than the permanent one to get a job, while 59% would have accepted a salary lower than what they wanted and 71% a job that did not allow teleworking.
The general director of Apec, Gilles Gateau, considers that this is “a form of pragmatism that is affirmed in a more difficult context.” Between the classes of 2022 and 2024, the proportion of young graduates who consider having a “food job” also increased significantly, by seven points, to reach 24%.
This study is based on the InserSup system that measures the professional integration of higher education graduates, as well as an online questionnaire with 1,595 bac+5 graduates. Beyond young graduates, Apec points out in another study that executive hiring intentions decreased in the fourth quarter. An especially marked decline in medium and large companies: 43% of them plan to hire at least one manager, compared to 50% a year ago.
Source: BFM TV
