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Recent College Graduates Getting Low-Level Jobs More Than Ever

We analyzed more than two million resumes from the last 10 years. The results might be unnerving for recent college graduates.
By Chris Kolmar & Nick Johnson, Zippia

It’s not good news for this year’s graduating class, and it sounds like things are actually getting worse, when you consider the types of jobs that recent grads are getting. For the first time ever, 2.3 million actual resumes were collected and analyzed to get a peek at where people get their first jobs after college.

Graduates had to have their jobs for at least a year for them to ‘count’ as being their first job after school.

Of the top 100 most common jobs out of college in the past five years, 7% are for sales associate positions and 5% are cashiers. Other ‘bad’ first jobs for recent graduates, according to their resumes, are customer service representative (3.4%), server (2.35%) and volunteer (2.34%), which doesn’t pay at all.

How The Most Common Jobs Of 2014 Ranked Over Time

The assumption: In today’s job market, students are leaving school with less guidance as to what their career paths should be, and they’re entering a saturated job market in many cases. For majors like English and Liberal Studies, there isn’t really one ‘main’ career pathway to success, so students are taking whatever jobs they can get, or taking a low-paying job until they figure out what they want to do.

The most eye-opening part of what we found is that recent college graduates are working in the restaurant business at a far higher rate than ever before. Server jobs weren’t even listed in the top 100 most common jobs in 2004, and now they’re more than 2% of the current jobs recent graduates are taking.

Where The 10 Most Common Jobs Of 2014 Ranked In 2005
Job TitleRank in 2014Rank in 2005
Sales Associate15
Cashier28
Customer Service Representative31
Administrative Assistant42
Research Assistant56
Assistant Manager63
Office Assistant727
Server8Not In Top 100
Volunteer983
Manager97

How We Determined The Most Common Jobs For New Grads By Year

Zippia is all about understanding how real people progress through their careers. To do that, we breakdown the career paths of some 2,500,000 people based on their resumes.

From that database of resumes, we identify the first job someone has in the time span following their graduation date from college. For example, if you graduated from college in 2009 and then went to work as an analyst from 2009-2010, you’d be part of the 2009 graduating cohort and count as an analyst for your first job.

To make the data less biased towards transient jobs like short term internships, summer jobs, and volunteer work started during college, we define a "first job" as being the first job held for at least one year after graduating.

Finally, the percentages displayed next to the job titles throughout the article are based on the count of people with jobs in the top 100. So, when you see Sales Associates account for 7.2%, the denominator is the total count of people with job titles in the top 100 jobs.

We did this same analysis for graduates from 2005 through 2014, the most recent year for which reliable data is available.

100 Most Common Jobs Out Of College

About Zippia

Zippia is the career expert site, where recent college graduates can study the pathways of previous graduates to learn about which career routes they want to pursue. Career job data can be found on https://www.zippia.com/colleges-and-majors/.