What ESCP’s 2025 London Careers Fair Highlighted About the UK Talent Market
Key takeaways from ESCP London’s 2025 Careers Fair on how to stand out and succeed in UK's competitive job market
Following the success of the recent London Campus Annual Careers Fair, held on 2 October 2025, we sat down with Rohan Malhotra, Associate Head of Careers Services at ESCP London Campus, to discuss the current state of the UK job market.
He shared key insights from conversations with attending employers about the skills in demand, emerging industry trends, and where the future of work is heading.
What trends did you notice across different industries that are actively seeking talent right now?
Rohan Malhotra: The main thing we’ve noticed is that companies are increasingly looking for students who are up to date with AI tools. According to Indeed, the number of job vacancies for graduates has decreased by 33%, about a third less compared to last year, with companies like KPMG, Deloitte, EY and PWC all slashing recruitment. Isabel Berwick, from the FT, has appropriately dubbed this perfect storm of AI, economic uncertainty and political instability as the ‘jobpocalypse’, making it essential for young talent to find innovative approaches when it comes to job hunting.
At the same time, while there has been a shift in the availability and number of these roles, companies are still hiring early-career talent, but they seek very specific, combined skill sets. In fact, in a day and age where there are new tools and technologies by the minute, the only way to stay ahead of the curve is to invest in upskilling or reskilling. While AI might replace some entry-level positions, the real risk for most is losing out to candidates who can do those very same jobs but with an updated skillset that includes the efficient use of the new tools and tech.
Across all industries, we see a high demand for students and graduates who have both the knowledge and skills relevant to the job and can demonstrate technical and AI literacy. This means that for those entering their first job, it’s really important to keep investing in AI training alongside traditional hard and soft skills. For example, employers are looking for a solid understanding of technical skills like, SQL, Python, Bloomberg Trading, and the ability to effectively use GenAI prompts to automate processes and enhance efficiency and personal outputs.
Is this trend consistent across all industries?
RM: That’s a really good question. I think they’re not all at the same level, but we’re getting there slowly but surely. The biggest changes are happening in consulting, accounting, and law firms, wherein a lot of the data-oriented, analytical and administrative tasks, typically handled by graduate recruits, can be automated. For now, it’s less evident in other industries. For example, the luxury and creative sectors are still heavily people-driven and rely on human creativity. In the energy sector, the focus has been on a shift toward sustainability, but also increasingly on how AI fits into all of this, for example, how energy consumption from generative AI affects the carbon footprints..
Beyond AI literacy, what other skills are becoming more important?
RM: Obviously, it is extremely important to maintain the technical or hard skills we spoke about earlier.At the same time, soft skills like leadership, resilience, creativity, critical, strategic and analytical thinking are something that AI hasn’t been able to replicate just yet, so investing in personal skills development is equally as important as hard skills and AI literacy. In fact, many employers told me that in this day and age of AI, they really value an application that clearly has that human touch to it, as they are simply inundated with applications that look and sound the same.
What I always say to students I consult is that the best approach is to draft it yourself and use AI to proofread, but keep changing it to your personal tone of voice and how you sound and speak. Ask yourself, does it really add value to what you have to say? Don’t let the lack of personal touch and authenticity minimise your chances of being discovered.
Yes, at some big global companies, applications might be automated at the moment, but many companies confirmed to me that it is still their recruitment teams manually scanning applications. So when you have around 10 seconds to make an impression, don’t use the template wording that GenAI gives you, even if you think it sounds smarter than what you wrote. At the end of the day, if AI wrote it for you, it likely wrote a similar summary for hundreds of other candidates, too.
You mentioned those crucial first 10 seconds, do you have a tip for how to make a strong impression that quickly?
RM: My favourite advice is to include a personal summary section at the top of your CV. Just two or three lines that clearly show how you meet the most essential criteria in the job description - whether it’s speaking multiple languages, prior experience, education level, when you’re available to start, or even right to work.
Having that instant “match” with the job criteria will, nine times out of ten, be enough to get your CV in the consideration pile, or at least ensure an instant mental tick and that the recruiter continues reading to find more matches. Trust me, it will make all the difference.
From your conversations with UK employers, was there something that they found particularly compelling about ESCP students?
RM: Yes, actually. A lot of employers work with us because we have students who have two really important things: international business experience and language-speaking skills, with at least 90% students being bilingual and 50% plus trilingual.
Most of our company partners have an international presence where language-speaking skills are highly desired for communication with clients and international team collaboration. The fact that all our students are exposed to working internationally through ESCP’s practical approach means they are instantly a great match through having a good understanding of how different markets work and experience collaborating with different cultures.
It also goes back to what I was saying about offering unique skillsets, because our students have both a good understanding of the UK ecosystem through their studies, internships and practical consultancy projects, and, thanks to our multicampus model, they can also provide innovative and non-standard approaches to solving problems, compared to people who were only exposed to the UK business environment. That adds a lot of value for employers with global presence, and those who actively seek and encourage innovation and want to differentiate in the market.
What were your key takeaways from this year’s Careers Fair?
RM: I think that traditional careers fairs, where employers have stands and students circulate, might not be the format of the future. As companies are hiring fewer junior people, this creates an opportunity to come up with more innovative ways of engagement and think about how we can make the experience even more tailored to each employer’s needs. And what is good for us is that with our size and structure, we can be very flexible and adaptable and give employers access to a variety of niche, expert talent across our Bachelor, Master and MBA programmes throughout the whole year, matching their pipelines.
We know that our partners already love the quality of our students and the networking elements of the ESCP fair. We also invite them right at the beginning of the academic year, so there’s an opportunity to get a better feel for our students and facilitate that two-way knowledge exchange. So, the future might hold more innovative formats - sporting events, industry-specific networking, themed roundtables, etc.
We all know Gen Z operates in a very different way. For them, a job interview is not one-sided, where the company asks all the questions and assesses the candidate’s fit. It is very much a two-sided conversation, where they’re also assessing whether the company’s values, culture and environment fit them. Furthermore, talent retention beyond the initial two-year mark is a real problem for a lot of companies, so facilitating that two-way dialogue and co-recruitment opportunities tailored to both companies and our students is going to be our priority for the coming years.
About The Fair
The 2025 London Careers Fair brought together over 480 students on campus, with another 100 participating online from ESCP’s other European campuses.
Attendees included students from the Bachelor in Management (BSc), Master in Management, MSc in Energy Management, and MSc in Digital Transformation Management & Leadership, as well as guest students from other campuses. Notably, incoming MBA participants travelled from the Paris campus specifically for the fair, taking advantage of the school’s unique pan-European structure.
The event featured 24 corporate partners spanning finance, consulting, technology, energy, luxury, FMCG, and more. Employers offered insights on in-demand skills, emerging industry trends, and career pathways, providing students with practical guidance through presentations, networking sessions, and alumni interactions. Attendees also benefited from a professional headshot service, further supporting their career development.
Discover more about ESCP's European Career Centre and engage with the London Campus team by contacting us at locareers@escp.eu.
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