Where should postgraduates expect to work?

Ah, more fun with regional data.

It might come as no surprise to hear that if you've a PhD and don't want to work in academia, the most likely place for you to start your career post-graduation is London. However, what then gets interesting is where else people start.

If you're a medical scientist, graduates were next most likely to leave the country. Greater Manchester was the third most likely location place to get a non-HE job.

Almost all other PhDs were also most likely to leave the UK if they weren't in London, and then were likely to go to work in and around Cambridgeshire. Oxford, Greater Manchester and Hertfordshire were also popular with scientists. Bristol and Surrey with engineers and Oxford, the West Midlands and Tyne and Wear with arts and humanities. Psychologists showed less of a fascination for Cambridge, preferring the West Midlands, Kent and Surrey.

So, doctoral graduates, you might want to factor in housing costs post-HE.

For Masters graduates, with a rather different labour market, London's obviously the main destination - in fact, the Masters jobs market is more concentrated in London than the first degree market, with 29% of Masters graduates starting work there as opposed to 21% of first degree graduates.

But after that? You might be surprised. For biomedical graduates or engineers, the answer is Greater Manchester. For other graduates, it's leaving the UK entirely, followed by Greater Manchester and then the West Midlands - except for Masters graduates in the arts and humanities, where the next most popular place for graduates to work was West Yorkshire. Other popular regions were Tyne and Wear, Oxfordshire, Edinburgh and Merseyside, although there is certain deviation by subject.

But it's rather complicated and I'm aware that where to look for a job - and where you might be working - are important factors for young people juggling a budget. it's especially important that people who might be pursuing a career in a specific field, but come from an area where there are not a lot of local job opportunities in that area, are made aware of that so that they don't graduate, go home and then get frustrated because they can't find a job. This is going to happen a great deal in the difficult months ahead. We need to help where we can.