Fresh Grads in Singapore Race for Jobs Through Early Applications, Internships and Upskilling

For eleven months, Gan Yi Lin's weekdays ran on two shifts. She worked from 9am to 6pm at an internship, went home, and then sat through online university classes from 7pm to 10pm, three or four nights a week. The 25-year-old marketing student at the Singapore University of Social Sciences had moved from day classes to evening ones so she could take full-time placements, first at DBS Bank for six months and then at Temasek Trust for five. She calls it her internship marathon.

Her story is one of three that The Straits Times followed among recent Singapore graduates, and the backdrop is plain in the numbers. The graduate employment survey released in March found that 74.4% of 2025 graduates held full-time jobs, down from 79.4% in 2024. The share who applied for jobs but received no offers rose to 8.5%, from 5.7% in 2024 and 4.1% in 2023. The proportion seeking work or settling for temporary, contract or part-time roles also keeps climbing.

Employers facing tighter budgets and shifting skill requirements are hiring more cautiously, and technology has shrunk entry-level roles in several sectors. Prime Minister Lawrence Wong said recently that the Government is concerned the bottom rung of the career ladder is broken.

Gan's marathon began with a January to June 2025 internship at Globish Academia, an educational company in Bangkok, where she realised how thin her practical experience was. Preparing marketing materials for an English course for Thais, she was told the language was too complex for the audience. She had not considered that. She began applying in April, weeks before her last assignment was due, and sent 70 applications over four months. When no offers came, she widened her search to other sectors and sent 10 to 15 applications a day. She got a Singapore Airlines cabin crew offer in May but declined it to keep looking for marketing work. In July a recruiter found her resume on MyCareersFuture and invited her to apply for an operations executive role at a ride-hailing company. After two interviews she had an offer, and she started in August.

Muhammad Irfan Djuanda, 25, of the Singapore University of Technology and Design, began going to career fairs in his second year, asking about interview processes and application timelines. He learnt that many firms open applications in September and review them on a rolling basis, closing once positions fill. So he started applying in September 2025, seven months before finishing his engineering systems and design course. He sent 50 applications and received 15 rejection e-mails; most of the rest never replied. The rejections stalled him for one to two weeks. He came back by treating each interview as practice, and he built a bank of recurring questions, such as what skills he picked up from his projects. He also took two four-month internships, in building technology and banking, as a fallback. In April, before graduating, he had two offers, from a statutory board and a private company. He took the statutory board role and began work as a product manager in August, and he is now taking courses in project management, critical thinking and cybersecurity.

Muhammad Naufal Nasran, 26, took a different route. In September 2025 he began an eight-month attachment with airline alliance Star Alliance, working in its loyalty department as part of his air transport management degree at the Singapore Institute of Technology. He valued the mentorship and had hoped to convert the placement into a permanent job after graduating in October. That did not happen. He instead secured a five-month traineeship in the customer experience team, working on airport and transfer operations. When a full-time project manager post opened near the end, he interviewed, but it went to a candidate with more experience. He was disappointed, he says, but concluded that experience matters and that he must keep learning.

He is now looking at courses on dataset creation, dashboard development and project management certification. He has widened his applications across aviation and may add supply chain and management roles. Friends have told him of people sending more than 100 applications for a handful of interviews, which has taught him to expect the process to take time.

For now, Naufal is still searching, while Gan and Irfan are three months into their first jobs. The next survey will show whether their paths are becoming the norm.