A recent study has forecast graduate job vacancies for graduates to be down by 1.2% on last year. When I first came across this statistic it struck me as slightly odd. I mean, how do they know? As in, really know. Not just predict. Now I'm sure some very diligent men and women conducted several well thought out surveys, and at the same time some more diligent men and women considered patterns in recruitment behavior in all number of essential though potentially tedious areas, and finally we can assume this was used to calculate the final figure. But even with all this in mind there begs the question that this is all a bit like large-scale fortune telling for the graduate recruitment market.
After all predicting the future is a complicated task even at the best of times. 95% of the time I fail to accurately work out what food I will be eating for dinner in 24 hours time. This is in spite of conducting well thought out surveys of the fridge, and at the same time knowing my own historical eating patterns and other such variables. That's the difficulty which arises with only one variable: my inherent incompetence. Factor in wider components such as the economy, recruiter confidence, levels and distribution of talent, market developments, etc and it is pretty safe to conclude that trying to second guess just what number of graduate vacancies will be around for the whole of 2012 is a little like trying to predict the weather.
And yes, the cliche weather example really did just surface. The point is that it can still be a good year, providing employers remain confident and rigorously search out the ideal candidates for positions.
