AI and the Australian Graduate: What Career Centres Need to Know in 2026 and Beyond

The graduate hiring market is not collapsing. But it is changing shape, and the change is structural, not cyclical. AI is absorbing the routine tasks that early-career staff used to cut their teeth on, employers are screening for a different profile, and the one skill that decides who gets hired — communication — is the one most graduates arrive without.

For career centres, that combination is a problem and an opportunity. To understand it properly, we spoke to career-centre and employability staff at universities across Australia and New Zealand, and read their accounts against the national data. What follows is what we found, and what it means for the people trying to prepare students for a market that has quietly moved under their feet.

1. How AI Is Changing Graduate Hiring

The market is tightening at the entry level

The Australian graduate labour market has shifted noticeably over the past two years. Full-time employment rates for new undergraduates remain solid over the long term, sitting at 91% three years after graduation according to the 2024 Graduate Outcomes Survey. But the short-term picture is less comfortable. Graduate-specific job advertisements declined in 2024 compared to 2023, and early 2025 data suggested the softening was continuing.¹

The people working with students feel it. Mags Chalecka-Harris, Careers Centre Manager at Massey University, put it plainly: "The market feeling is brutal at the moment." That view came up across both countries.

Some of the pressure is cyclical. But a structural shift is also underway. Jobs and Skills Australia research, drawing on interviews and consultations conducted between October 2024 and July 2025, found clear evidence that AI is reducing or changing entry-level roles across multiple industries, including law, engineering, the arts, and healthcare. Globally, junior job postings dropped around 29 percentage points since early 2024, with AI tools absorbing tasks that early-career staff traditionally handled.²³

The squeeze is not even. For international students it is sharper. A careers coach who works with international students at a sandstone university described two compounding problems: "Because of the visa requirement, a lot of employers are still skeptical around the capability of international students. They are not only competing with their international student cohort, they are also competing with the local graduates. So it is definitely not easy." A careers practitioner at a New Zealand university was blunt about the ceiling: "Most employers are not open to international applicants regardless of quals, experience and fit." Mags Chalecka-Harris described the brokering her team does in response: "International students are probably the trickiest ones. A lot of them say employers don't want to employ them, and employers say they need work-ready graduates, so we have to merge in between and prep students so they can be seen as valuable."

At the same time, demand for AI-related skills has tripled over the past decade. In 2024, more than 1,500 Australian organisations were actively recruiting for AI-skilled workers. The direction of travel is clear. The graduate hiring market is not shrinking uniformly, but it is bifurcating. Roles requiring routine task execution are under pressure. Roles requiring human judgment, communication, and the ability to work effectively alongside AI are growing.⁴

One caution is worth stating, because it affects how much pressure any given career centre actually feels. The Graduate Outcomes Survey measures employment regardless of its level. As a careers adviser at a regional university noted, "Students could be working as baristas, admin assistants, or entry-level professionals, and they will be counted the same as doctors, lawyers, or vets. There is not a huge amount of pressure within the university to increase rates of employment." His point was institutional and regional. A regional university with strong professional-course pipelines and a relatively captive local intake feels far less of this pressure than a Group of Eight or large urban university competing directly for the same students and the same employer attention. The market is tightening, but the felt urgency is not distributed equally across the sector.

Employers are changing what they screen for

AI is also changing the mechanics of hiring itself. AI-assisted resume screening, automated first-round assessments, and algorithmically ranked candidate pools are now standard practice at many large ANZ employers. According to global data, AI adoption among HR professionals surged from 58% to 72% between 2024 and 2025.⁵

The result is an arms race that career centres are watching play out in real time. Students use AI to generate applications, and employers use AI to screen them. The first casualty is the generic application. A careers adviser at a large New Zealand university reported the employer view directly: "The big feedback we are getting from employers and recruiters is that they are getting way too many cover letters written by AI, answers to questions written by AI, and they can tell, because they have got 20 of the same thing." A practitioner at a public university described the same mechanism from the systems side: "We know that AI recognises AI. Some organisations that use tracking systems recognise it, so an application may not get through if it is too polished, too finessed. AI will always over-embellish."

This is a moving target, and the applications are getting harder to spot. Graham Powell of Curtin University, speaking in a personal capacity, has watched the quality curve shift: "When I first started, the resumes I was looking at were so generic. They had nothing to do with anything. But now students are getting clever on how to use it. It is all about the prompts." As students improve their prompting, some employers are changing the format of the test itself. Mags Chalecka-Harris is preparing students for a different kind of first round: "There is more of a 'send us a video of yourself' now. We have to prepare for something new, because employers are catching up on the fact that something has been done by AI. And the funny thing is, on the other hand, the AI is checking."

This shift has a direct effect on students. With AI screening out candidates on keyword and skills matching, graduates who do not present clearly and specifically on paper are eliminated before a human reads their application. But for those who make it through, the interview stage carries more weight than ever. The application is increasingly an AI-filtered threshold. What happens in the room, or on screen, is where the decision gets made. And as one practitioner pointed out, clearing the AI filter is not the same as being ready for what follows: "Employers are aware that AI is being used. So where is the authenticity? You may get selected for an interview, but if you cannot support your application with evidence, you will not get the job." An application a candidate cannot stand behind in person is worse than no advantage at all. The moment a real person enters the process, the ability to speak clearly and credibly about your own experience becomes the thing that decides the outcome.

PwC's 2025 AI Jobs Barometer found that roles most affected by AI in Australia have seen skills requirements shift 88% more than other roles. Employers are still hiring graduates, but they are hiring for a different profile: candidates who can communicate ideas, manage ambiguity, and contribute to stakeholder conversations from day one.⁶

2. The Communication Skills Gap

Communication is the most wanted, least delivered skill

The gap between what employers need and what graduates arrive with is not new, but it has widened. The QS Global Employer Survey 2024 found that among APAC employers, communication ranked as the second most important skill for graduate hiring, behind only teamwork. At the same time, it was named one of the top three skills gaps. Employers want it and they are not finding enough of it.⁷

The North American data is sharper. The NACE Job Outlook 2024 report rated communication as the single most essential career readiness competency, scoring 4.55 out of 5 for employer importance. Graduates scored 3.62. On the same survey, 99.5% of employers considered communication skills important, but only 55.2% of new graduates were rated proficient.⁸

In Australia, Jobs and Skills Australia data shows 18% of employers rank communication among their most important hiring criteria. That figure understates the issue, because it only captures top-ranked priorities. When employers describe what is actually missing, communication comes up again and again: structuring an argument under pressure, speaking clearly to clients, contributing in meetings, and handling feedback in real time.

The career officers we spoke to said the same thing without prompting. A practitioner at a public university pointed to the employer data directly: "If you've heard of AAGE, the Australian Association of Graduate Employers, they do a survey every year and communication is always at the top. Students need to develop their communication skills. That can include public speaking, negotiating, persuading, navigating conflict." A regional university adviser put the gap in employers' words: "Employers are saying the new generation is coming in lacking things like showing initiative, communication skills, people skills, human skills. They say they are a bit more exaggerated now, perhaps as a result of COVID and growing up with technology."

When we asked officers to name the single most important skill for a graduate to build, communication came up most often. Some named networking or critical thinking instead, but those answers sit under the same umbrella. As one Auckland adviser noted, "70 to 80% of jobs in New Zealand go through networking," which is communication applied to relationships. Mags Chalecka-Harris made the point plainly: "Communication is the basic of everything. That's the umbrella that sits over everything. If you don't communicate, you're never going to get anywhere."

The label itself causes part of the problem. Graham Powell of Curtin University, speaking personally, argues the term sells the skill short: "We call them transferable skills, because 'soft skills' makes it sound like they are not important. There is nothing soft about the soft skills. They are very hard to learn and hard to implement in the correct context." Yvonne Gaut, Graduate Career Coach at the University of Otago, gave the most direct version of the advice: "Their interpersonal communication skills, their human skills, their ability to connect with somebody, their ability to listen. You have got to get out from behind the computer and go and talk to people."

AI makes this gap more consequential, not less

There is a common assumption that as AI handles more written and analytical work, the pressure on graduates to communicate well will ease. The evidence points the other way.

When AI produces the first draft of the report, the spreadsheet, or the briefing note, the graduate's job changes. They are no longer the person doing the writing. They are the person presenting the conclusions, defending the reasoning, and building client or stakeholder trust in the output. The floor for written work has risen. The value of speaking credibly and clearly has risen faster.

A careers coach at a sandstone university made the case bluntly: "Most university graduates should be capable of doing 95% of graduate roles, because it is not rocket science. The reason some employers choose you over others is not because you are more capable of doing the job. It is because they enjoy spending time with you." Once AI flattens the baseline, the human factor decides the outcome.

In the marketing sector, practitioners note that AI handles data analysis and reporting well, but it cannot interpret what an insight means for the business or communicate strategy to a client. That is a human job. The graduate roles that survive AI automation in consulting, professional services, and finance share one feature. They require sustained verbal interaction with other people.

Communication is no longer a soft skill. It is employability currency.

That view, echoed by a career officer at the University of Sydney Business School, reflects what hiring managers are increasingly telling career centres. The framing of communication as a "soft" skill has always been misleading. In a market where AI handles more of the analytical work, it is increasingly the primary differentiator.

The same shift makes a second skill essential, and the officers raised it repeatedly: critical thinking applied to AI itself. Students now have to judge what the tool gives them. Grozdana Manalo at the University of Sydney Business School named it as her single most important skill: "There is access to so much information, but being able to critically think about what you need, what resources can actually offer you, and whether it is coming from a legitimate source, that sums it up." Graham Powell ties it back to the technology's own name: "Look at the word artificial. Students need to work out, AI is giving me this information, what can I use, what can I not use, what is reliable, what is unreliable. And should I use it at all? Is this the right way to use it?" A practitioner at a public university kept the human judgment point central: "AI is good as a help, but it will never replace your own understanding of who you are and what you can do." AI fluency without critical thinking produces confident, generic, and sometimes wrong work. That is the opposite of what employers are screening for.

The interview is where graduates lose opportunities

The single point in recruitment where communication is most directly tested, and where graduates are most consistently underprepared, is the interview. A March 2024 report from Handshake and SHRM found that 79% of HR professionals consider interview performance very important for entry-level hiring. That number has held even as other parts of the process have been automated.⁹

Officers who sit on hiring panels see the cost directly. A regional university adviser described it without softening it: "A lot of people are terrible at interviews. They do not look at the rubric, they do not look at what the employer actually wants, and they just freewheel and ramble. I have seen people who could be very competitive applicants get nowhere, because they are not putting in the effort to make themselves competitive." The problem is sharper for some groups. A careers coach at a sandstone university noted that "a significant portion of international students do not articulate themselves assertively enough in important moments like an interview or an employer networking session to instill confidence in employers."

Yet interview preparation, particularly structured verbal practice with real-time feedback, is one of the things universities do least well at scale. Career centres offer mock interviews, but most students never access them. Those who do often get one session close to an application deadline, without the repetition needed to change how they actually speak under pressure.

3. What Career Centres Are Dealing With

Serving a large cohort with a small team

Career centres across Australian and New Zealand universities work in a structural bind. Demand for individual career support has never been higher. The resources to meet it have not kept pace.

The ratios make the problem concrete. Mags Chalecka-Harris runs a service where "we have got six people and we have got over 20,000 students. And 60% of our students are distance students who actually don't think the career centre is for them." An adviser at a large New Zealand university described a similar load: "We have 12 on the careers team, a couple more in the faculties, and the university is about 40,000 students." A practitioner at a public university confirmed it is sector-wide: "Career services, regardless of who you speak to, are underfunded. We are always being asked to do more with less."

At those ratios, one-to-one support cannot reach most students. Workshops and group events cover larger numbers, but they cannot replicate the repeated, personalised practice that actually changes how a student performs. The question is not whether to scale. It is how to scale without losing the quality that makes the support worth using. Massey's distance cohort sharpens the point. A large share of students do not even see the service as relevant to them, which means scale is also a reach problem, not only a capacity problem.

Student engagement is a persistent problem

Even where programs and resources exist, engagement is low. Research published in Studies in Higher Education in 2024 found that around 40% of students had not used or attended their university's careers or employability modules. Other studies put non-participation in extracurricular career activities above 40% for later-year students.¹⁰¹¹

The officers see this every week, and they are clear it is not new. A practitioner at a public university described the standard pattern: "If you get students who register on Career Hub, you get a 50% attrition. So 25% turn up. Amongst all of that white noise, it is trying to get their attention." Graham Powell gave the harder numbers: "You get 40 students register and 10 show up. We had 500 register for an online one, 25 turned up, and only two or three actually interacted. The old 'we'll watch it later', no one is going to watch that later." This problem predates AI. AI did not create it, which means the fix is not better marketing of the same formats. It is delivering support in a way students will actually use, on demand and interactive, rather than scheduled events and recorded sessions they ignore.

Part of the gap is awareness, and part is style. Mags Chalecka-Harris pointed to students who "stand in front of a poster and say I didn't know about it. Well, there is a poster right here." A poster, a fixed-time workshop, and a static PDF are built around how the career centre works, not how students live. Students expect immediate, interactive, on-demand help, and the support that reaches them has to match that. Scaling the wrong format louder will not move the numbers. Scaling the right format will.

Engagement is also uneven, which is the real equity issue. The groups officers named as under-served are not the ones the sector often assumes. Distance students frequently do not think the service is for them. Students with disabilities are underutilised by employers and under-supported in practice. International students show the opposite pattern, engaging heavily and asking for more human contact than the service can easily give.

A scalable model has to account for both ends of that range, the students who never come in and the students who cannot get enough. International students sit firmly at the latter end. Grozdana Manalo described the pattern: "It is predominantly international postgraduates who access our workshops. A lot come from mainland China, a very different education system, and the mentality is, if the university is offering it, I must access all of it. With local students it is more, if I think I need it, I might look for it." They also ask for the most human contact. As the next section shows, 79% of students who used an AI review tool but still came back for human review were international. That creates a specific tension: the cohort that needs the most support, and asks for the most human time, is also the cohort least likely to trust AI tools. Serving them well means tailoring preparation to the local market, coaching the assertiveness that interviews demand, and building trust in any tool you deploy rather than assuming uptake.

Personalised practice and the human touch

Interview preparation is one of the most resource-intensive things a career centre does. A real mock interview needs a staff member's time, scheduling, preparation, and feedback. Multiply that across every student who needs it and the arithmetic breaks. Graham Powell named the tension directly: "The most effective ones are the one-to-ones, because you are getting that conversation, that customised care. But it is clearly not sustainable."

The good news is that digital scaling works when the tool is right. Grozdana Manalo has the clearest proof: "We have had over 4,000 students sign up to VMock and three and a half thousand actually use the resume reviewer. To physically do 4,000 resume reviews and give two pages of feedback each would have taken a lot longer than a year and probably 10 more staff members, which we do not have." That is a small team reaching thousands of students with consistent, parameter-set feedback. No amount of hiring would have matched it.

Scaling does not remove the human. It moves human time to where it counts. Grozdana found students "still want a human to look at it," so her team added pre-work to prepare students for the tool and a debrief afterward. Catherine, a careers practitioner at a sandstone university, sees the same demand in the numbers: "Only a few thousand students out of 70,000 use VMock, and 50% of those still come to the career centre for the human touch. Of those, 79% are international and 21% are domestic, and 64% are master's students and 36% are undergrads." A practitioner at a public university explained why that human layer cannot be automated away: "When students get emotional, confused or worried, a prompt is not going to help. You need a human on the other end who can empathise." A careers coach at a sandstone university described the new division of labour: "Our job has become more of a safety net. Once a student has the high-level feedback from the AI tool, we are the next level of gatekeeper. It is really AI plus human interaction now." An adviser at a large New Zealand university runs the same blended model, with AI review, online review, and in-person drop-ins side by side.

The lesson is not that technology replaces practice or replaces people. It is that the right digital tool absorbs the volume work, frees your team for the human work only they can do, and reaches students who would never have booked an appointment. The two universities getting value from this did not just buy a tool. They built the pre-work, the debrief, and the human follow-up around it. Scaling works. Picking the right tool and wrapping it properly is the whole game.

4. What Institutions Can Do

Anchor career programming to specific job descriptions

Generic interview preparation is better than nothing, but it does not transfer well to real hiring. The students who perform best have practised answering questions tied to the specific role, industry, and employer they are facing.

The officers see the same failure pattern over and over. A regional university adviser put it directly: "Students write their application without taking into account what employers are looking for. The one skill to actually get a job is to spend more time looking at the job descriptions, tailoring their applications, and really considering what the employer wants." He framed it as a simple mismatch of intent: "It is like going to a hairdresser and asking for a specific cut, but they decide they can do better and give you something else. It might be a good-looking haircut, but it is not what you asked for. That is what so many people do with a resume. They write something that makes them sound great, but they are not giving the employer what the employer wants."

There is a useful nuance here. The point is not to contort students to fit a posting. Yvonne Gaut framed it as matching strengths to demand: "It is not about shaping them to fit that job, but thinking about what they have got to contribute and who is going to want that." Both versions point the same way. Start from the employer and the role, not from a generic statement of self.

Career centres can close part of this gap by building job-description-specific preparation into their programs. That means moving away from 'prepare for an interview' as a general activity and toward 'prepare for this role, in this sector, with this employer.' Grozdana Manalo describes the goal as recruitment-process mastery: "We are really trying to prepare students for recruitment processes. Job search mastery, interviews, assessment centres, case interviews. A lot of that starts with students reflecting on what they have done and putting together compelling stories for recruiters." The more specific the preparation context, the more the practice carries into the real thing. This also means working with employer partners to learn what they actually ask at first-round interviews and building that into the resources students receive.

Prepare students for rejection, not just for the application

Standard career advice carries an implied promise. Fix the resume, write a good cover letter, and you will get the job. That promise does not hold, and pretending it does leaves students unprepared for what actually happens. A former careers practitioner with experience across higher education, vocational education, and private practice put it directly: "What universities are not preparing students adequately for is how to manage disappointment. They are guiding with hope, and hope is necessary, but a lot of what I see is 'fix your resume and write a good cover letter and you will get the job.' This is not the case. Every job has hundreds, if not thousands, of applicants."

The same practitioner tied this to a broader readiness gap: "Students need more practical skills and resilience skills. Universities are very theoretical and detached from the real world. There is too much focus on theory and not enough on internships, actual work experience, and interpersonal communication skills." Resilience is not a consolation prize for students who fail. It is a core skill for a market where rejection is the normal case, not the exception.

The practical version of this is adaptability. Mags Chalecka-Harris framed it as the one skill she would tell any student to build: "Be adaptable. If you get rejected, adapt, change, and evolve with the evolving market. Otherwise you get stuck behind." Career centres can build this in by being honest about base rates, by treating rejection as expected rather than exceptional, and by giving students enough real practice that they can recover from a poor interview instead of being defined by it.

Scale practice through technology, not just events

Peer-to-peer mock interview programs are an underused lever. Structured well, with question banks, feedback prompts, and clear protocols, they let students practise at volume without a staff member in every session. AI-powered practice tools are the newer option. They let students rehearse responses at any time, get structured feedback, and repeat until they improve. The value is not that they replace human feedback. It is that they build the repetition students need before they reach a human. A student who has practised an answer twenty times uses a mock interview far better than one who has never tried.

The honest picture is that many institutional tools are underused. An adviser at a large New Zealand university reported that "our interview practice tool is used far less, far far less than the CV tool, and possibly people can just do it with AI now, so they do not need it." Grozdana Manalo saw the same at a much larger institution: "Students are not as willing to use the mock interview tool. It has definitely not been as high as the resume feedback." The wrong read on this is that digital practice does not work. The right read is that universities have not done a good enough job finding the tools students actually want to use. When the institutional option is clunky or generic, students default to ChatGPT, and the career centre loses both the engagement and the data.

The fix starts with picking tools that match how students learn. Catherine, a careers practitioner at a sandstone university, named her own service's problem plainly: "The career centre is in need of dynamic learning. We currently use static worksheets and PDF guides." Static resources delivered on the institution's timetable lose to interactive, on-demand AI every time. Broadcasting content is not the same as interactive learning, and it does not produce engagement. Graham Powell described the limit: "We broke the topics into two or three minute chapters on YouTube. There are plenty of resources for them to access. But are they watching it? We do not know. You just click it, you could walk away, and you have viewed it." The bar universities should set is interactive learning at scale, not more content to ignore.

Integration drives uptake. Grozdana Manalo found that putting the resource hub where students already are changes behaviour: "Because our resource hub sits on Canvas, students are more likely to use it. It is almost like a warm lead. We have over 9,000 business school students who have accessed at least five pages on our Canvas hub." A tool students have to find, log into separately, and trust on faith will sit idle. A tool built into their existing workflow gets used.

Rolling a tool out properly is the career centre's job, not the vendor's. That includes building trust, which is a real barrier. Grozdana Manalo was direct about where it bites hardest: "There is low trust in our international student community with AI. They do not trust it because they think it is not based on what actual recruiters want, and they think their information will be shared widely." A tool that students do not trust will not get used no matter how good it is. The two services getting real value did not just buy a tool. They wrapped it. As Grozdana put it, "It is not just a tool you can deploy and students go and use it. We do preparation before and a debrief after, otherwise they put their resume through, get the feedback, and do nothing about it." Find the right tool, integrate it, build trust, and wrap it with human support. Do that and digital scaling works. Skip it and you get an expensive licence no one opens.

Prioritise earlier and more frequent touchpoints

Late intervention is the least effective intervention. Students who first engage in their final semester are already behind. The ones who do best in graduate recruitment usually started building communication and interview skills in first or second year.

The incentive runs the wrong way, because students care least about career preparation when they are furthest from the job market. Grozdana Manalo described the structural fix her team is building, which is to tie support to the stage of the degree rather than waiting for students to seek it: "There is a lot going on in the co-curricular space, but it relies on the student almost knowing what they do not know. We are tightening the links to the degree, so in second semester of first year, here is what you should be doing now." Graham Powell argues the same logic points to the curriculum: "That is our big push, because that is maximum reach. That is every student sitting in a lecture who hears about us."

There is an open question worth naming. If curriculum embedding succeeds and reaches everyone, does it reduce one-to-one demand or increase it? Graham is not sure, and he asked it directly: "If that is successful, would that translate to less one-to-ones?" The honest answer is that the evidence cuts both ways. Curriculum reach could absorb the basic questions and free up one-to-one time. It could also surface demand from students who never knew the service existed, which raises one-to-one volume. The available signal leans toward complement rather than substitute, since students who use scalable tools still come back for the human conversation, as the previous section showed. Plan for both, and do not assume reach lowers your one-to-one load.

Measure what students can do, not just what they have accessed

Most career services measure engagement. Event attendance, appointment bookings, workshop completion, page views. These metrics are fine for internal reporting, but they do not tell you whether a student got better. A student can finish a workshop and leave no more prepared than when they arrived.

Access data is where most measurement stops. Grozdana Manalo has good analytics by sector standards: "We get analytics from Canvas. About 80% of students use our Canvas site. The highest uptake is the recruitment sites and, surprisingly, the wellbeing pages." That tells her what students opened. It does not tell her what they can now do. Graham Powell named the gap from the practitioner's side: "Ninety percent of students, you just do not know. When I started, one of the frustrations was, how do I know this is valuable, because you do not see the impact."

This is the real prize in scaling through technology. Done right, interactive learning at scale should produce far better data than completion and access rates. Confidence assessments before and after structured practice, evidence of how a student's answers improve across repetitions, and comparisons of outcomes between students who practised and those who did not all tell you something access numbers never will. Measure what students can actually do under pressure, not just what they clicked. That data improves your programs, and it is the evidence institutional leadership keeps asking career centres to produce.

The Bottom Line

The graduate market has bifurcated. AI is taking the routine work, employers are screening on a tighter, more human profile, and communication has become the deciding factor rather than the nice-to-have. Career centres feel this most acutely as a capacity problem: more demand, the same small teams, and engagement that has been stubbornly low for years.

The way through is not more content or louder marketing of the same formats. It is interactive, on-demand practice that scales the volume work, frees staff for the human conversations only they can have, reaches the students who never book an appointment, and produces evidence of what students can actually do. The institutions getting value from technology are not the ones that bought the most tools. They are the ones that picked the right tool, integrated it where students already are, built trust, and wrapped it with human support. That is the whole game.

Methodology Note

This report draws on publicly available data from Jobs and Skills Australia, the QS Global Employer Survey 2024, PwC's 2025 AI Jobs Barometer, the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) Job Outlook 2024, the Australian Graduate Outcomes Survey 2024, and peer-reviewed research on student engagement in employability activities at Australian universities.

The qualitative findings come from interviews and written submissions with career centre and employability staff at Australian and New Zealand universities, conducted in May and June 2026. Nine interviews and three written note sets informed the report, spanning sandstone, metropolitan, and regional institutions across both countries. Participants chose whether to be named or to remain anonymous. Where a participant did not explicitly consent to being named, they are described by role and institution type. Quotes have been lightly edited for readability without changing their meaning.

About the Author and Elqo

Elqo is an AI-powered communication practice platform built specifically for university students preparing for graduate employment, and for career centres that want to scale their support. Elqo is currently working with a small number of career centres in ANZ. If this research is relevant to what you are working on at your institution, I would welcome a conversation about what Elqo is and how career centres are approaching these challenges.

William Burden | Founder, Elqo | william@elqo.app

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