With more graduates and fewer vacancies, competition for jobs is fierce. But those leaving university aren't just competing with their peers in this country. Today's university leavers increasingly find that they are applying for the same jobs as graduates from abroad. There is a globally mobile, graduate workforce and leading employers seek to recruit the very best global graduates.
Around 3.5million students are currently studying outside of the country in which they were born. But external mobility among UK students is low, lagging way behind our international competitors. There are 370,000 foreign students studying in the UK, but recent estimates suggest there are only 33,000 UK students studying abroad. Last year, there were fewer than 12,000 UK students who took up a place on the Erasmus programme, compared with nearly 100,000 in Germany, France and Spain. So while we are very good at producing global graduates, too few of them are UK citizens.
And this is bad news for UK plc. The so-called 'headquarters effect' suggests that business leaders are likely to hold a stronger emotional attachment to the country from which they are from. It implies that such people at the head of multi-national companies are more likely to support the operations in their home-countries, rather than those abroad. Ensuring more global business leaders are UK citizens should be a strategic priority for our country.
In our report Global Graduates into Global Leaders, we have spoken to leading employers and identified the global competencies which they look for in potential recruits.
These employers, who collectively recruit over 3,500 graduates each year, across a range of sectors, were asked to rank a list of key skills for global graduates. And there is good news for those young people who gave-up on foreign languages long ago. The employers placed multilingualism low down. While the ability to speak another language is an important skill, it was viewed as complementary rather than essential. Employers recognise that it is not only linguists who have the potential to become highly sought after global graduates.
Instead employers want individuals who are comfortable working in global teams - ready and willing to work with people from different cultures and backgrounds. Such cultural agility is about more than completing a gap year lazing on a beach. People who take an active interest in the world around them and have a global mindset will catch recruiters' eyes. They need to be able to show that they have thought about the global challenges and opportunities facing business and are willing to travel to respond to them.
While graduates need to focus on developing their global competencies, it is difficult for young people leaving university easily to re-invent themselves as global leaders at the age of 21. That's why schemes like Erasmus are so important. Many of our European counterparts talk about the 'Erasmus Generation' and businesses see former Erasmus students as future leaders. It is now time for the UK to catch-up and focus on building its own Erasmus Generation. Government and educational institutions need to provide the right environments and opportunities for young people to flourish and enable them to develop not only sound employability skills, but a global mindset too.
Global Graduates into Global Leaders was a joint project by the Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR), Council for Industry and Higher Education (CIHE) and research agency CFE.