University career support has become overly centralised and generic, failing to provide the discipline-specific guidance students need as competition for graduate roles intensifies.

Given such a poor graduate job market, with a 7% drop in graduate roles YOY across all sectors (ISE, 2026), a 2^nd successive year of decline in the market, this now leaves less than 10,000 graduate jobs for over 1 million graduates, a ratio of 100 students per job.

Given the worsening nature of this employment crisis, ideally students would have access to decentralised support, with careers being devolved back to schools. Academic societies can help to build a bridge by partnering with university placement units to deliver targeted career sessions, leveraging firsthand insights from students on placement and successful recent graduates.

The Problem

• Loss of Dedicated Support: Career support has shifted away from dedicated school departments toward centralised, generic online resources.
• One-Size-Fits-All Inadequacy: Career paths are highly specialised - guidance for a motorsport engineer is entirely different from that for an illustration student.
• Increased Competition: With rising graduate numbers and a shrinking pool of graduate roles, access to tailored, specific career advice is more critical than ever.

The Solution

• Leverage Academic Societies: Societies provide a natural peer-to-peer network to share firsthand insights from students currently on placement, recent returnees, and successful graduates.
• Collaborate with Placement Units: Academic societies should partner directly with the university placement unit to co-host discipline-specific career sessions, workshops, and real-world application insights.
• Improve Careers Advice: By creating a P2P network working directly with the careers team, they can keep their knowledge of what is expected by employers up to date by learning from the source.