The UK graduate market, sorted your way.
Explore every UK graduate scheme across 14 sectors — search it, browse by industry, get matched to your CV, and rehearse for the interview. Built by one person who found it hard too, and free to use for as long as it exists.
Fourteen industries. One map.
Hover a sector to size up the market at a glance — the pay, the openings, the biggest employers — then dive into the full guide.
Law works differently — so we don’t list it.
Becoming a solicitor or barrister isn’t a graduate scheme. You apply for a training contract or pupillage up to two years ahead, usually after a vacation scheme or mini-pupillage, and firms recruit on a calendar that has almost nothing in common with the schemes on this site.
Rather than list law badly alongside everything else, we’ve left it out. Two sites do it far better than we could — use them instead.
Where you work shapes the job.
The same scheme pays differently, competes differently and lives differently depending on which city it sits in. Here is how the map actually breaks down.
London is the default, not the only answer. It holds 778 schemes across 319 employers — more than twice any other region — and a median graduate salary of £36,000. If you want breadth of choice in one place, nowhere else comes close.
But two-thirds of schemes sit somewhere else, and the gap is narrower than it looks. Outside London the median is about £30,700: a difference of around £5,300 that higher London rents can quickly eat into. The South East leads the rest with 318 schemes, much of it commutable to London without London housing, and Scotland fields 247. The North West runs 238 across 112 employers, with Manchester the biggest single graduate market outside the capital.
The small markets are worth a second look precisely because they are small. Northern Ireland has 22 schemes, the Channel Islands and Isle of Man 31 — a fraction of the volume, but a fraction of the applicants too, and offshore finance pays well against a local cost base. A weak application in London can be a strong one in Belfast or St Helier.
One caveat worth knowing: 114 of the 2,580 schemes here are nationwide, remote or based outside the UK, so they are not tied to any single region. The regional counts above describe the 2,466 that are, each counted where the job is rather than where the employer has its head office.
Grad schemes aren’t for everyone — but they do a few things really well.
Not everyone needs a two-year rotational programme, and plenty of great careers start elsewhere. That said, when a scheme fits, the trade-offs can be genuinely worth it. Here’s what you actually get.
Structure when you need it most
A defined 18–30 month programme with rotations, milestones and mentors takes the guesswork out of your first job. You’ll know what you’re doing in six months, and what’s expected in eighteen.
A proper training budget
Study leave, exam fees and funded professional qualifications — ACA, CFA, PMI, chartership — the kind of things that would cost thousands and years of evenings if you funded them yourself.
Real rotation, real exposure
Two, three, sometimes four different teams in your first stint. You’ll finish knowing what you like, what you don’t, and where in the business you actually want to be.
A cohort going through it with you
20, 50, sometimes 200 people starting on the same day. It’s the closest thing to freshers’ week you’ll get again — and those relationships often outlast the scheme itself.
A brand that opens doors
Fair or not, “Deloitte graduate scheme” or “Rolls-Royce graduate” carries weight for the rest of your career. It’s a shortcut past a lot of gatekeepers, even years later.
Salary that keeps pace
Most schemes have a locked-in second-year uplift and often a third bump on completion. Graduates on schemes typically out-earn peers who took ad-hoc roles by year three.
Who they’re not for. If you already know exactly what you want to build, you thrive in flatter, smaller teams, or you’d rather move faster than a corporate structure allows — a startup, a specialist boutique or self-employment can genuinely beat a scheme. There’s no shame in either path; the point is to choose deliberately.
Three tools to find, prepare and stand out.
The core of Find me a Grad Scheme is free — find the schemes that fit you, prep for the tests employers set, and pick the courses that strengthen your CV.
Scheme finder
Tell us your degree and where you want to be — or paste your CV — and we rank the schemes that fit you, with a reason for every match.
Find my match →Test prep
Practise the aptitude tests employers actually use — numerical, verbal, logical and more — with interactive sample questions for each.
Start practising →CV Boost
Seventy-two courses and certifications that genuinely strengthen a graduate CV — with our honest take, the cost and a direct link for each.
Boost your CV →What’s coming next.
The free tools above are the site as it stands. These four are what we want to build next — sketched out here so you can see the direction, and tell us which would actually be worth having.
Weekly scheme picks
Tell us your criteria once and every Monday we send a short, curated shortlist worth applying to — deadlines flagged, an honest take on each.
See details →CV → personal website
Upload your CV and we build you a polished, interactive personal site — on-brand for your sector and shared as a link, not a PDF.
See details →Company prep pack
Pick the employer you want most and we build everything specific to applying there — their process, their questions, their numbers.
See details →Assessment day pack
Got an assessment centre booked? Get ready for every exercise on the day — group tasks, case study, presentation and a pre-day checklist.
See details →Bookmark the site and check back regularly. None of these exist yet — there’s nothing to buy and nothing to sign up for — but new features will appear here first, and everything the site does today stays free. Press Ctrl + D to bookmark this page.
I built Find me a Grad Scheme because I wish it had existed when I was applying.
Applying for graduate schemes is genuinely confusing, scattered and stressful — and right now it is harder than it has been in years. Hundreds of applications for a handful of places, rejections that never explain themselves, and no clear picture of what is even out there. I know how that feels, because I went through it myself. This started as a personal project — collating every scheme I could find, writing an honest take on each one — and grew from there.
The site is free, and it will always be free. Not free for now, not free until there are enough of you — free. Finding a graduate job should not depend on whether you can afford better information, and a tough market is exactly the wrong moment to put a price on it. Everything that helps you search, compare and prepare stays open to everyone. The ideas sketched under “coming next” aren’t built yet, and they are extras — never the price of admission.
What I do need is your help keeping it accurate. There are 2,580 listings here and employers change their pages quietly all cycle, so some details will drift out of date. Always check the employer’s own site before you apply — and if you find something wrong, missing or closed, tell me or email findmeagradscheme@gmail.com. Corrections go straight into the data, and you’ll have made this better for whoever looks next.