Graduates in STEM ‘need to rise by half’

>>Assuming that the number of STEM graduates who enter non-STEM professions remains the same, this will require an extra 40,000 STEM graduates in every year until 2020: a rise of nearly 50 per cent on current numbers. Why does this have to be an assumption? Increasing the number of STEM graduates who go into STEM professions seems to me to be a realistic goal. I'm a careers consultant at a large University Alliance institution. We train a lot of engineers and scientists, but it's very difficult for them to find entry-level roles, particularly in non-engineering and non-IT areas, but also in Engineering. If you have a degree in lab-based science and you want to find work in a lab or in research and analysis with a strong quantitative base, it's extraordinarily difficult to find companies or agencies which are recruiting at entry-level. It takes a huge amount of persistence and self-direction to find those roles. Meanwhile, the finance and business sectors - including small businesses - invest an enormous amount in graduate recruitment, with whole teams dedicated to grad scheme marketing, recruitment and training. So a lot of STEM graduates take their quantitative skills into business and finance, simply because those employers are going out looking for them and STEM employers don't seem to be. Gradcracker and TargetJobs are both good resources for engineers (neither has many lab-based or research roles) but even so, graduate civil, electronic and electrical engineers have a higher unemployment rate six months after graduation than English or History graduates. They usually believe that they'll just walk into work, because they've been told over and over again that there's a huge demand for engineers, and it comes as a real shock to them how hard the job market can seem.