What Employers Actually Look For
Fifty-five job listings, and the gap nobody names out loud.
A research project built on fifty-five real graduate job listings, to find out where what universities teach and what employers actually want start to disagree.
Concrete, implementable recommendations instead of a vague "teach more practical skills."
There's no single "graduate job market." Finance, tech, marketing, consulting and HR each want something different, and a general degree doesn't map cleanly onto any one of them.
Fifty-five listings, broken down by how much each sector emphasises hard skills versus soft skills — Finance at 61% hard-skills, HR at 52% soft-skills — with communication showing up in 67% of every listing, regardless of sector.
The actual gaps are specific: no hands-on training with the tools employers use day to day, limited comfort with commercial numbers, and not enough practice working across time zones or remotely.
Recommend targeted workshops on specific tools (CRM platforms, Excel, SQL) rather than rebuilding an entire curriculum from scratch.
Used AI to process and pattern-match across all fifty-five listings — the kind of scan that would take days by hand, done in a fraction of the time.
A prioritised, specific list of fixes for both students and the university.
""Employability" isn't one target — the skills that matter change completely depending on which part of the job market you're actually walking into."
Read the complete report submitted for this project, including the research, analysis, strategy, and final recommendations.