Help at hand 24 hours a day for job seeking graduates

Prospects.ac.uk provides careers chat forum and email advice

Job seeking graduates who wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night are not alone. They can log on to a 24 hour chat room to swap messages with fellow job hunters on Prospects.ac.uk, the UK’s national graduate recruitment website.

Graduate Forum offers students and graduates their own message board to post career-related messages, observations, hints and tips. The message board is moderated by Graduate Prospects staff and a careers adviser regularly facilitates many of the discussions.

Careers advisers can also be contacted via email from the site. Graduate Questiontime offers a free service for graduates who are EEA nationals and have left university within the last five years. They can email a question to a careers adviser and will receive a response within three working days. There are also 48 Frequently Asked Questions that already have answers on the site and cover a wide range of topics.

In addition the website also includes a job search facility which graduates can use to find details of current vacancies. They can search by type of job category and by location and this will bring up a list of jobs that may be of interest. Clicking onto an individual vacancy provides details about the role, often including salary, what the job involves, the closing date for applications and contact details for the company.

Prospects.ac.uk is operated by Graduate Prospects, the leading UK provider of graduate careers and recruitment solutions. Chief executive Mike Hill comments:

There has been a huge surge in popularity of the online services provided on Prospects.ac.uk over the past couple of years. Graduate Questiontime now attracts over 1,000 queries a month and has seen a 70 per cent increase in the number of graduates using the service in the past year. Graduate Forum has over 7,000 registered users with over 500 new users registering each month and an average of 300 messages posted each month.

The increasing popularity of these types of online resources is not surprising when you look at the results of recent research commissioned by Graduate Prospects and carried out by MORI amongst over 1,000* final year students.

Mike Hill explains: The research revealed that the Internet is the most popular source of careers information with 78 per cent saying they have used it to search for details about different career options, job vacancies or postgraduate courses. It is an ideal tool to use because it is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week and means that graduates can access information whenever they need to.


Graduate Prospects is the trading subsidiary of the charity HECSU. Graduate Prospects gift aids its profits to HECSU annually to fund charitable projects for the HE sector. HECSU and Graduate Prospects work in partnership with the Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services (AGCAS) to maximise the career opportunities and support available to students and graduates. The Graduate Prospects service includes over 800 different career guides, graduate marketplace reports and the Prospects Series of recruitment and postgraduate course directories and magazines, e-guidance, career planning software, web and online options to enhance the careers advice provided in higher education Careers Services. All information is accessible on Prospects.ac.uk. HECSU is an agency of Universities UK (UUK).

*1,040 full-time undergraduate finalists were interviewed face-to-face by MORI in 25 different higher education institutions between 28 February and 21 March 2003.