The Career Readiness Pulse · 2026
130+ employers just told us how career-ready their new talent really is.
The Career Readiness Pulse is our cross-sector survey of the people who hire, onboard and manage early careers talent.
The sample
A proper read on the market, not a hunch
Responses from employers, universities and early careers practitioners.
Sectors represented across the sample, from engineering to financial services.
Questions covering readiness, onboarding, skills gaps and retention.
Inside the report
What the Pulse covers
Six themes, drawn from the questions early careers teams told us they were actually wrestling with this year.
Readiness at the point of hire
How employers actually rate the talent arriving on day one — and the specific gaps that show up first.
The first 90 days
What organisations are doing to onboard early careers hires, what lands, and what is quietly failing.
The skills gap, named
The behaviours and human skills employers say are missing, in their own words rather than ours.
Ghosting, no-shows & early attrition
How widespread day-one no-shows and first-year drop-off really are across the sample.
Manager confidence
How equipped line managers feel to develop early careers talent — and who is training them.
What good looks like
What the strongest performers do differently, and what it would take to copy it.
Tier one · Free
Get the full Career Readiness Pulse report
The full whole-market findings, the charts, and our read on what they mean for anyone planning an early careers programme for 2027. Tell us where to send it and it lands in your inbox the moment it’s released.
Tier two · By request
Your sector, read properly.
The report gives you the whole-market picture. The sector cut is a conversation. We take the responses from your sector, set them against the full sample and against what we see delivering programmes on the ground, and work through what it actually means for your team.
Where your sector diverges
The themes coming out of your sector’s responses, set against the full 130+ benchmark so you can see what’s specific to you and what’s happening everywhere.
What it means for you
Your programme, your cohort, your pinch points read against the pattern. This is interpretation and comparison, not a numbers readout.
Three things to change
You leave with facts on how others in your sector are finding career readiness
A straight word on sample sizes
Some sectors are represented by a handful of organisations. We won’t dress a small sample up as a statistic. Where the base is thin we say so, and we work from the themes, the verbatim comments and the full-sample benchmark instead — which is usually the more useful conversation anyway.
30 minutes, one to one, no pitch deck.
10 September 2026
The findings go public at Salesforce, Liverpool Street
We’re hosting a roundtable at Salesforce’s London HQ on 10 September, where the Career Readiness Pulse is released for the first time. Early careers leaders in the room, findings on the table, and an honest conversation about what to do with them.
Can’t make it? Get on the list and the report reaches you the same day.
About the Pulse
The Career Readiness Pulse was fielded in July and August 2026, drawing 130+ responses from employers, universities and early careers practitioners across the UK.
- Respondents self-selected via LinkedIn and the Global Career Advantage network.
- The sample skews toward organisations already running structured early careers programmes.
- Sector-level cuts vary in size. Where a base is small we report direction and themes, not percentages.
- Full question wording and the response breakdown are included in the report.
Be first to see it
The report drops on 10 September. Put your email in and you’ll have it the same day along with the option of a sector briefing if you want the version that applies to you.