Degrees, Dreams & Detours: Rethinking Graduate Employment
Tue Aug 12 2025
What happens when you finish your degree, full of hope and ambition - only to find that the job you trained for doesn’t exist, or isn’t hiring?
In the final episode of this series, Think: Business Futures explores the difficult and often disheartening journey that many young graduates face in low-income contexts, particularly in West Africa.
Host Ali Aitken is joined by three expert guests from UTS in a candid conversation that spans continents, cultures, and career paths. From public sector dreams to entrepreneurial pivots, they look at the optimism gap, mismatched expectations, limited opportunities, and systems that don’t always support the transition from education to employment - and how these challenges compare to the Australian landscape.
They are:
Dr Esther Mirjam Girsberger, Senior Lecturer, Economics Discipline Group at the UTS Business School. Esther Mirjam currently runs a study on young graduates and their labour market opportunities in Cote d'Ivoire (West Africa). Esther Mirjam and her team surveyed more than 2,000 high school and university graduates about how they search for jobs and how they perceive the labour market to learn more about why they face high unemployment rates.
Dr Rebecca Addo, Research Fellow at the Centre for Health Economics Research and Evaluation (CHERE), and
Professor Jua Cilliers, Associate Dean of Research at the Faculty of Design and Society.
What can we learn from each other? And how can we build systems that support young people, wherever they are?
Hosted and produced by Ali Aitken
More
What happens when you finish your degree, full of hope and ambition - only to find that the job you trained for doesn’t exist, or isn’t hiring? In the final episode of this series, Think: Business Futures explores the difficult and often disheartening journey that many young graduates face in low-income contexts, particularly in West Africa. Host Ali Aitken is joined by three expert guests from UTS in a candid conversation that spans continents, cultures, and career paths. From public sector dreams to entrepreneurial pivots, they look at the optimism gap, mismatched expectations, limited opportunities, and systems that don’t always support the transition from education to employment - and how these challenges compare to the Australian landscape. They are: Dr Esther Mirjam Girsberger, Senior Lecturer, Economics Discipline Group at the UTS Business School. Esther Mirjam currently runs a study on young graduates and their labour market opportunities in Cote d'Ivoire (West Africa). Esther Mirjam and her team surveyed more than 2,000 high school and university graduates about how they search for jobs and how they perceive the labour market to learn more about why they face high unemployment rates. Dr Rebecca Addo, Research Fellow at the Centre for Health Economics Research and Evaluation (CHERE), and Professor Jua Cilliers, Associate Dean of Research at the Faculty of Design and Society. What can we learn from each other? And how can we build systems that support young people, wherever they are? Hosted and produced by Ali Aitken