Conversation Starter: Job Search is Taking Longer for Laid-off Post-Grad Degree Holders
Aaron Terrazas
Chief Economist at Glassdoor | Mar 6, 2024
The time it takes laid-off postgraduate degree holders to find a new job is up sharply in recent months while it remains at or below pre-pandemic norms for laid-off Bachelor’s-degree holders and laid-off workers with less than a college education.
Among laid-off workers, the typical number of weeks currently unemployed – as of January 2024 – was:
- 7.4 weeks for workers without a college degree compared to an average of 8.0 weeks before the pandemic (2017-2019 average),
- 8.4 weeks for workers with a Bachelor’s degree compared to 10.0 weeks prior to the pandemic, and
- 13.7 weeks for workers with a postgraduate degree, compared to 10.1 weeks prior to the pandemic.
Among new labor market participants (including recent graduates and workers who were previously out of the labor force), the typical number of weeks unemployed is below pre-pandemic norms for workers with less than a college education and for postgraduate degree holders, and is slightly above pre-pandemic norms for workers with a Bachelor’s degree only.
These data provide further evidence of a two-track labor market – with some knowledge workers encountering a noticeably softer jobs market, while blue collar workers continue to encounter a tight jobs market.
Conversation Starters are a periodic series of charts and data points from Glassdoor’s Economic Research team aimed at sparking conversations on timely trends in employee satisfaction, workplace community, the future of work, and the labor market more broadly.
Aaron Terrazas
Aaron Terrazas is chief economist at Glassdoor. He oversees the Glassdoor Economic Research program, providing research, analysis and commentary on today’s evolving workplace and fast-changing labor market. Previously, Aaron served as the director of economic research at the trucking startup Convoy, and served in a similar role at the real estate marketplace Zillow. He started his career as an economist in 2012, supporting the work of the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Macroeconomic Analysis at the United States Treasury Department, and also worked as an analyst on immigration and labor markets at the the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute. He was educated at The Johns Hopkins University and at Georgetown University.
Tags:Labor MarketUnemployment
