As employers cut back on internships and placements, Perlego data shows students are building workplace skills independently through reading focused on resilience, emotional intelligence, communication, influence and motivation.
Key takeaways
- Students are seeking out self-directed learning that develops workplace-relevant skills.
- Resilience, emotional intelligence and motivation feature strongly in the most-read titles.
- Employers may need to look beyond placement history when assessing early-career talent.
London, 15 October 2026: Applications for university internships rose 27% last year, but employers cut internship and placement hiring by 8%, according to the Institute of Student Employers’ latest Student Recruitment Survey. Competition for experience is set to grow increasingly fierce - but data from digital learning platform Perlego suggests many students are not waiting for a placement to start building the skills employers want.
The personal development books UK students are seeking out on Perlego point to a generation actively building key life and workplace skills: emotional intelligence, resilience, communication, influence and motivation. These are skills employers are watching closely, with a separate ISE survey last year finding that almost half of graduate employers (46%) reported concerns about resilience in new graduates, up from 30% in 2023.
The most-read personal development books among UK students on Perlego
- The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Mark Manson
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R. Covey
- Grit, Angela Duckworth
- How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie
- Drive, Daniel H. Pink
- Influence, New and Expanded: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert B. Cialdini
- Emotional Intelligence 2.0, Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves
- Everyday Emotional Intelligence, Harvard Business Review
- The Intelligent Investor, Benjamin Graham
- On Grief and Grieving, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler
The most-read title by far is about resilience and deciding what matters, read by almost three times as many students as the next book. Decades-old classics feature strongly too - including Dale Carnegie’s 1936 bestseller on communication and Benjamin Graham’s 1949 guide to investing - alongside a book on navigating grief, which also makes the top ten.
With internships harder to come by, students can’t rely on work experience alone to prepare them for the workplace. Our data shows many aren’t waiting.
Some universities are already building self-directed learning into their programmes. At Ravensbourne University London, students use Perlego to build their own reading lists for projects, with skills employers value built into how they are assessed.
Methodology: Data is drawn from Perlego platform activity and counts unique readers in the UK identified as students who read books in the personal development category, from 2020 to 2026.
