WHAT ARE EMPLOYERS SAYING ABOUT GRADUATES AND HYBRID WORKING?
WHAT DID EMPLOYERS SAY?
LAURA REID, Employer Engagement Coordinator at the University of Edinburgh Careers Service outlines a recent research project undertaken by a summer intern which gathered employer perspectives into hybrid working and how we can help students prepare. When we recently surveyed the employers we work with, we wanted to find out how the pandemic has changed the working world. Many students have asked about employer expectations regarding hybrid working. For some, this is because they want to work remotely, for others because they want to be on-site. Students have also asked what support will be available in terms of equipment and training, and how flexible different organisations or roles will be, as this can be a key factor in career-decision making. As we know from wider labour market reports, opportunities with flexible or hybrid working practices are often seen as more attractive (CIPD, 2023). We wanted to find out if these flexible options are available for recent graduates and what skills they will require to thrive in a hybrid environment. The survey was promoted to all the organisations on our vacancies and events platform, MyCareerHub, over 3 weeks in July 2023. We incentivised responses with a prize draw to win free advertising and received 112 responses from a broad range of sectors. We sent targeted emails to specific sectors we felt were less represented to encourage them to share their views.
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As we suspected, hybrid working is the most common way of working now (47% of employers), meaning many students are likely to work in hybrid environments at some point in their careers. This was followed by 35% fully in-person, with fully remote roles being the least available (3%). The remaining employers offered roles which fit into a variety of categories. We asked those who only offer fully in-person roles to explain their reasoning. 61% responded that this is due to the nature of the job. Different sectors, and roles, will be limited in how flexible they can be, but it was particularly notable that only 13% answered that it was because they found it easier to measure performance. 23% said it was better for team communication and 3% said it was due to a lack of IT resources to support hybrid working.
We are encouraging students to think about the questions posed around hybrid working Interestingly, whilst 81% of the employers allowed their new graduate employees to work in a hybrid way from the start of their contract, there was anecdotal feedback that it is crucial to be in the office in the first two to three months. Both employers and the graduates we interviewed saw this extended induction period as important to understand the role, meet co-workers and understand the work culture. There were no obvious sector trends to this, so it seems to be more aligned to different organisational cultures. We also found that 86% of employers stated in their job adverts the level of hybrid working they were offering for each role. This is encouraging in the context of how we ask employers to be fully transparent through the AGCAS Work Experience Standard.