Graduate Careers in a Changing Workplace: A Fresh Challenge?

This chapter concludes the handbook of research by considering patterns and emerging trends in the global workforce, and the challenges and opportunities these features pose for graduates embarking on their career journey. In recent years, this landscape has experienced dramatic and unprecedented changes, while also continuing to evolve in incremental ways. This chapter considers the influence of this landscape alongside the multitude of other factors in the ecosystem that shape a graduate's career journey. Drawing on research exploring the experiences of students transitioning to the post-pandemic workplace, we reflect on the challenges that new graduates have reported, before considering the extent to which this new backdrop presents problems and opportunities that are truly new, and the ways that different stakeholders invested in supporting graduate careers must now work more closely together so that students and new graduates are prepared for thriving careers in this new era.