Graduate jobs & schemes in Brighton and Hove 2025

Brighton

Home to two large universities in the shape of the University of Brighton and the University of Sussex, students are provided with a wealth of opportunity when they study there, whether this is academic or employment opportunities. Graduates when they study on the South coast are always impressive when they are put before employers and recruitment teams.

However, we wanted to know why this was. To do this we took all the data from students who have signed up with graduate-jobs.com and graduated between 2009 and 2014 and see how they fared when compared with graduates from across the country. We looked at the degree classifications, whether or not they had work experience and what were the sectors that they would like to work in. From this we could get a picture of the type of graduates from Brighton and compare then with the averages from the rest of the UK as a whole.

Sectors

When graduates are starting to look at what sectors they would like to pursue a career in, there tends to be a general theme across the UK's regions and cities. However, with graduates from Brighton, they buck the national trend with ambitions in more creative sectors. With the top three most popular sectors chosen by graduates who studied in Brighton being Marketing, Management and Advertising and Public Relations, we can see that Brighton's graduates are perhaps more inclined to the creative sectors. While their top five also included the creative sector Media and Banking.

The interesting thing to note about these results is the volume in which graduates from Brighton wanted to study these subjects. An impressive 26.6% wanted to pursue a career in Advertising and Public Relations, compared to 22.3% nationally. Likewise with 23.9% of students from the South Coast town wanting to study Media, compared to just 19% nationally.

Degree Classification

Degree classifications do vary from university to university with no national consensus or yard stick to measure classifications against. However, graduates from Brighton continue to impress nationally with their academic achievement. A staggering 12.5% of graduates from universities in Brighton were awarded for their hard work. This was extremely impressive when just 9.8% of graduates from the UK achieved this top mark.

The academic prowess of graduates was seen again when looking at those graduates who achieved an Upper Second Class (2.1) degree. An impressive 58.6% of graduates from Brighton received this impressive degree mark, more than 10% higher than the national average of 48.1%.

Work Experience

Unfortunately this is where the graduates from Brighton fall down slightly when in drawn in comparison with the rest of the UK. Only slightly it must be added however. Only 12.5% of graduates from the universities in Brighton had managed to gain work experience while they were studying. This was slightly lower than the national average which stands at 16.6%. However, this is something that easily remedied with a few months in some form of entry level or menial employment, which always provide the kind of skills and experiences that employers are looking for.