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This chapter examines the notion of graduate occupations and examines how occupational boundaries are structured within the four occupations. Various existing analytical approaches link graduate occupations to skills use or requirements, high autonomy, or the prevalence of degree holders. These classifications cannot deal very well with the fact that what counts as graduate labour in a graduatizing and competitive labour market is symbolically negotiated (and therefore socially constructed). On top of this, substantive differences in skill requirements and job tasks make the use of existing classifications for distinguishing the graduate and non-graduate occupations challenging. The chapter also shows that many graduate occupations may lack the organizational power, occupational identity, or knowledge base for professionalization to develop.

This chapter examines the notion of graduate skills. The graduate labour market is often understood as that part of the labour market characterized by high skills and high knowledge intensity and that is perceived to be needed and used in an increasingly complex economy. Higher education is understood as the developer of these advanced skills. The chapter shows that in all four occupations a mixture of soft and hard skills is required to perform the roles. Most skills in graduate work are not associated with higher education and within the job setting, there is limited space to use the hard skills graduates have developed during higher education.

This chapter assesses whether higher education within the four occupations performs as assumed according to the dominant discourse on graduate labour. The chapter aims to elucidate what the meaning and value of graduate education and university qualifications are within the four graduate occupations under investigation. The chapter examines how we can describe the meaning that higher education has within these occupations, whether the university degree functions as a credential, and to what extent higher education drives career progression. It shows that the significance of higher education differs between the occupations and tends to be overstated. Within a mass system of higher education, university credentials lose much of their value to employers and employees alike, certainly several years after graduation.

This chapter examines the notion of graduate careers. By examining the career of graduate workers in the four occupations, it argues that university education does not tend to be the direct driving force within the careers of graduates. There is nothing intrinsic about the graduate labour force that warrants set career paths. Characterizations such as the ‘boundaryless career’ can be associated with some graduate workers but it would be hard to associate the concept with graduate work or graduate occupations that graduates perform. Boundaries still shape graduate careers. There also exists great heterogeneity between and within occupations in terms of security and predictability.

This chapter examines the recruitment and selection process in four graduate occupations (scientists, software engineers, financial analysts, and press officers). How do graduate workers access jobs? Who is eligible to enter graduate roles and why? What does it take to be recruited and selected in both entry-level and more senior roles? This chapter shows that recruiting and selecting suitable candidates is a deeply contextualized, situational, and occupation-dependent process. The hard skills and knowledge skills often identified to distinguish graduates from non-graduates do not have a privileged status in it. The chapter shows that despite the differences between occupations, sectors, and positions there are indeed few general principles that define the recruitment and selection process for graduate workers.