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Stuart Gentle Publisher at Onrec

London Remains Graduates’ Choice for Financial Services Careers

The study examined 600 applicants for financial services jobs, all of them graduating in 2017 or set to graduate in 2018 or 2019.

Despite the prevailing uncertainty surrounding Brexit and its fallout, a recent survey has shown that London is still the most attractive destination for career-minded graduates with a future in finance on their minds.   

The study examined 600 applicants for financial services jobs, all of them graduating in 2017 or set to graduate in 2018 or 2019. Exploring their aspirations and motivations, the ‘Gen Z Hiring Report’ put paid to speculation that the EU referendum had had a negative impact on the capital’s appeal to future professionals.  

The capital is still the place to be for aspiring professionals

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Source: Max Pixel

It is no secret that Brexit casts the future of not only Britain as a whole but the City in particular into doubt, with many recruiters having articulated concern over losing the UK’s brightest young talent to overseas employers. Bringing with it a distinct lack of certainty, our exit from the EU has long been considered a black cloud hanging over the financial sector but the Gen Z study indicates that its impact has been far less marked than one might expect.  

The percentages are surprisingly robust. Asked where they most wanted to work, an astonishing 84 percent of those polled cited the capital. Perhaps the biggest surprise, however, was how few looked with favor upon alternatives to the City. Paris and Frankfurt, widely touted as potential bases of operation for banks and insurers looking to move their operations, were embraced by just 4 and 2 percent of respondents respectively.  

This is not because of a lack of awareness on the part of young professionals. Even those who have only just begun to embark on forex trading for beginners, who have the most basic and underdeveloped knowledge of the financial sector, know what’s to come, so those who view the banking and investment industries as the key to their future career are arguably well informed enough to understand what’s at stake.

Employers are equally optimistic

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Source: Max Pixel

Students and recent graduates are not the only ones to embrace the future of the City, even with the uncertainty that comes as part of the new and vastly altered territory of a soon-to-be independent UK. Many employers share their optimistic attitude too.  

Deutsche Bank are a prime example. Upping their London hiring in the months following the referendum, they are amongst a slew of City companies who have vowed to either maintain or grow their rate of hire.   

According to expert Terri Loska, this is, in part, a response to the strength of feeling amongst future financial services employees. She explains: “London is still very much the place that European candidates want to base themselves and would see themselves for the next one to three years.”

One area where the prophesized trend has very much been bucked is in the realms of private equity and hedge fund enterprises, which are looking to hire in London at the graduate level for the first time in over a decade.   

It appears that the future is far brighter for the London financial sector, its recruiters, and its would-be employees than one would ever have imagined…