Britain’s graduate starting salaries soar 7% in a year

Bloomberg

Britain’s 2022 university graduates will compete for jobs with salaries 7% higher than their equivalents last year, although each one will still have to fight off 35 other applicants to secure the role.
Advertised graduate salaries have risen to a six-year high of £26,076 ($32,000) this summer, research from the job search site Adzuna showed. The number of vacancies on offer has spiked 59% from a year ago. That still leaves 36 graduates competing for every job, the firm said.
The figures highlight how companies will look to graduates to help ease the tightest jobs market in decades. By offering more roles and higher starting salaries, companies may alleviate an acute shortage of workers that’s left vacancies across the economy at a record high.
The higher salaries are also a reflection of red-hot inflation, which stands at a four-decade high of 9.1% and is expected to hit double-digits later this year.
Graduates from Bayes Business School, Oxford, Imperial College, Cambridge and University College London are top of the tree for earnings. All of their grads are likely to earn more than £40,000 after five years.
Meanwhile, more than half a million female managers will have to be added in the UK before supervisors reflect the labour force, according to a report by the Chartered Management Institute that highlights a failure by companies to develop female talent.
The data adds to a wealth of evidence of female underrepresentation in the best-paid roles in UK business. Half of the country’s smaller listed companies still have all-male leadership teams, while Aviva Plc Chief Executive Officer Amanda Blanc said that the sexism she encounters has worsened as she has risen through the ranks in finance.
The shortfall of women managers, which the CMI says is set to worsen in the coming years, has already prompted action by regulators. Earlier this year, the Financial Conduct Authority set listed companies a goal of at least one woman in the role of chief executive officer, chief financial officer or senior independent director.
To address the significant shortfall of managers from underrepresented groups, including women, the report calls on the government to commit to wider pay gap reporting and avoid awarding contracts to companies that consistently fail to diversify their leadership teams.
Employers and the government need “to step up and accelerate the pace of change especially as growth is faltering and thousands of employers see skills shortages,” Ann Francke, chief executive officer at the CMI, said in the report.
The CMI also found a discrepancy between how companies perceive themselves and how they act. For example, 83% of firms said they were inclusive of people regardless of their class but just 26% were taking active steps to increase the proportion of employees from lower socio-economic backgrounds.