Two dominant rationales are offered by UK policymakers for the continued expansion of higher education: to service the high-skill labour requirements of a knowledge economy, and to increase educational and employment opportunities for under-represented groups. The discourse of employability connects these two rationales in a simplistic manner. Individual employability is described as both the means by which to obtain and maintain high-quality employment and to eradicate the social reproduction of inequality. However, evidence drawn from a survey of graduate careers suggests that for a cohort of recent business and management graduates, the relationship between employability and employment is far from straightforward. The data suggest that traditional labour market disadvantage still appears to be an impediment to achievement, regardless of the extent to which graduates develop employability skills during their undergraduate studies.

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The expansion of the higher education system and widening access to undergraduate study has led to growing diversity within the graduate labour supply, including increasing numbers who studied for their degrees as mature students. Analysis of graduates entering the labour market prior to the major expansion in the early 1990s indicated that those over the age of 30 had considerably more difficulty than younger graduates in accessing the career opportunities for which their education had equipped them. Is this still the case for more recent graduates? Drawing on a major qualitative and quantitative study of a class of graduates who completed their undergraduate degree courses in 1995, this paper explores early career development and employment outcomes according to age at graduation. Although we find considerable diversity among all age groups, mature graduates were more likely than their younger peers to experience difficulty in accessing appropriate employment, had a lower rate of earnings growth and expressed higher levels of dissatisfaction with their jobs.

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