Manpower Minister Tan See Leng told Parliament in May that graduates were taking longer to find their first full-time job, but urged that the softening be read in context. The 2022 benchmark of 87.5%, he said, reflected an unusual post-Covid-19 rush to hire. Over the past decade, employment rates for degree holders aged 25 to 29 have stayed “broadly stable” at around 90%.
Landing a post-graduate job increasingly depends on who has the stamina to keep auditioning. By the time a local undergraduate collects a degree, they have often completed two internships, sometimes more. At Singapore Management University (SMU), the 2024 cohort averaged 2.8 internships each.
The 2025 Joint Autonomous Universities Graduate Employment Survey, published on March 5, found that while 83.4% of fresh graduates found work of some kind within six months, the share in full-time permanent roles fell to 74.4%, from 79.4% a year earlier. More took part-time or temporary work, and the share doing so involuntarily rose to 3.1% from 2.3% in a single year.
