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More and more voices are adding weight to the claim that work experience is essential if you want to be succesful in the hunt for a graduate job.

At a Graduate Recruitment Roundtable event in London recently, head of talent at Michael Page, Elizabeth Ewen, remarked that ‘employability skills’ would become increasingly important for students leaving university.

Also, a new report out this week by High Fliers Research suggests that graduates who don’t have any work experience to sweeten up their CVs will struggle to land a graduate job in today’s tougher climate.

‘The Graduate Market in 2011’ report says that 3 in 5 employers think that graduates with no work experience under their belt will have ‘little or no chance’ of receiving an offer this year.

On a more positive note, the graduate survey also revealed that around 10 per cent more graduate jobs should be advertised this year when compared to 2010.

Managing director of High Fliers Research, Martin Birchall, said it was very encouraging that the main graduate employers would have more graduate jobs on offer this year, but, with more students graduating this summer, the market for graduate vacancies is likely to be tough.

“Today’s report includes the stark warning that in this highly competitive graduate job market, new graduates who’ve not had any work experience during their time at university have little or no chance of landing a well-paid job with a leading employer, irrespective of the university they’ve attended or the academic results they achieve,” said Mr Birchall.

The good news is that most of the big graduate employers have work experience programmes available this year. Between them, they are offering over 10,000 places on work experience schemes and advertise many of them through jobsites like E4S and universities such as Cambridge, Oxford, Manchester and the London School of Economics (LSE).

If this has convinced you that you need to get more work experience while you are still studying at university then don’t hang around any longer. Start searching now for internships and work experience opportunites in your desired graduate job sector on our Work Experience & Internships homepage.