Five Asian jurisdictions run a formal route that lets a recent graduate stay on to look for work: South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. They differ on three points that matter more than the headline length of stay: whether the graduate may work during the search, whether the degree has to come from … Read more
A worker in the Italian Mezzogiorno faces unemployment odds more than four times higher than a worker in the country’s industrialized north, according to the OECD’s Employment Outlook 2026, released July 7. In Newfoundland’s Division No. 9, unemployment sat at 29 percent versus 3.3 percent in Quebec’s Nicolet-Yamaska, a nine-to-one gap within a single country. The … Read more
The training pipeline that turned graduates into working professionals is breaking, and no one agrees on who should repair it. A June 2026 BBC News panel, “Is Gen Z trapped by AI?”, put the problem plainly. Young people were told AI would make them more employable, and instead many watch the first rung of the … Read more
The World Bank has approved a new regional program intended to connect education, skills training, and employment for young people in Cabo Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, and Guinea. The program is called SIRA, short for Skills for Innovation, Resilience, and Aspirations. Its first phase has $642 million in financing and is expected to reach 5.4 million … Read more
On November 30, 2025, 2.83 million people sat China’s national civil service exam at the same time, in 250 cities, competing for 38,100 government positions. One of those positions, an entry-level police officer role at an immigration repatriation center in Ruili, a small city on the Myanmar border, drew 6,470 applications for a single opening. … Read more
When a recent American graduate went viral in May for publicly detailing his months-long failed job search, the reactions split predictably: sympathy, dismissal, debate about whether the problem was real or personal. The data says it is real. What the data also says, and what the viral conversation mostly ignored, is that this is not … Read more
The headline number looks like good news. Employers project 5.6 percent more new graduate hires for the Class of 2026 compared to last year, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers’ spring update. 77.2 percent of recent graduates landed a role within three months of graduating, up from 63.3 percent a year earlier. Set … Read more
A 24-year-old in New York, a 24-year-old in Seoul, and a 24-year-old in Shanghai are all struggling to land a first professional job in 2026. From a distance, it looks like one global story. Up close, it is at least three different ones, and the difference matters, because what would fix the problem in one … Read more
There is no single Asian job market. A new graduate in Shanghai and one in Tokyo are living through opposite problems at the same moment: one is competing against a record flood of fellow graduates for too few jobs, the other is being courted by employers who cannot find enough workers. Both realities are happening … Read more
The period between finishing a degree and starting a career is shorter than it used to be — and more pressured. But for those willing to delay the conventional path by a year or so, there are more structured ways to live and work abroad than most graduates realize. Some pay a salary. Some cover … Read more