Overview
This research cluster examines graduate labour markets, skills utilisation, and technological disruption. The unifying concern is heterogeneity: higher education expansion and technological change do not affect all graduates, jobs, or skills equally. Understanding who benefits—and who doesn’t—requires moving beyond average effects to examine how returns vary across fields, occupations, firms, and career paths.
Research Questions
- How has employer demand for graduate-level skills evolved, and how well are graduates’ skills actually utilised?
- What are the economic returns to STEM education, and why do they vary so much across graduates?
- Which workers and jobs are most exposed to generative AI, and what does this mean for the future of skilled work?
- When graduates earn more, is it because of what they know, what they do, or where they work?
Approach
This work combines task-based measurement of job skill requirements with large-scale labour market data. Rather than relying on occupational titles or qualification levels, I use detailed information on what workers actually do in their jobs—drawing particularly on the Skills and Employment Survey series. For questions about STEM returns and career progression, I work with linked administrative data on education and earnings. Recent work on AI exposure applies natural language processing to measure how job tasks overlap with large language model capabilities.
Funded Projects
- Graduate Labour Market and Equity — Centre for Global Higher Education, 2020–2024. Project page
- ADR UK Research Fellowship — Administrative Data Research UK, 2024–2026. Programme page
Key Publications
-
Degrees of demand: a task-based analysis of the British graduate labour market
Golo Henseke, Alan Felstead, Duncan Gallie, and 1 more author
Oxford Economic Papers, 2025
This study investigates the evolving demand for graduate skills in the British workforce, leveraging a task-based approach with data from the Skills and Employment Survey Series.
-
Nine Raters, One Index: Carrying LLM Disagreement into Labour-Market Estimates
Golo Henseke, Rhys Davies, Alan Felstead, and 3 more authors
arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.22748, 2025
When a large language model supplies research annotations, the choice of model becomes an analytic degree of freedom. We ask how much that choice matters by putting 1,100 task-occupation cells to nine models from three vendors and weighting their ratings with worker-reported task importance in the British Skills and Employment Surveys. Rankings are substantially more stable than levels: pairwise rank correlations range from 0.74 to 0.92, while the share of British jobs scoring above 0.5 ranges from under 0.1% to 38%. We therefore treat the rater as one dimension of a multiverse, reporting each rater-specific estimate and its range alongside a Rubin-style summary that incorporates their observed dispersion. The consequences depend on the downstream design. The paper contributes a sketch of how to carry rater disagreement into downstream analyses.
-
Europe’s evolving graduate labour markets: supply, demand, underemployment and pay
Francis Green and Golo Henseke
Journal for Labour Market Research, 2021
Analysing European graduate labour markets up to 2015, we find that graduate supply increased and converged across countries, while graduate job growth was slower and non-convergent. Underemployment spread modestly, real wages trended downward, and graduate wage premiums declined in several countries.
-
Should governments of OECD countries worry about graduate underemployment?
Francis Green and Golo Henseke
Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 2016
Using a new index of graduate jobs across 21 OECD countries, we find that graduate underemployment is correlated with supply-demand imbalance and associated with lower pay and job satisfaction, though higher education retains external benefits even for the underemployed.
Header image: “Zenith Z-19 Terminal” by FlipFlopFlorida, licensed under CC BY 2.0. No changes made.
