When Did Preparing for Adulthood Become So Consuming That We Barely Have Time to Live It?
On graduate unemployment, the pressure to be employable, and a generation preparing for a life it hasn’t had the chance to live.
Our twenties are supposed to be years of discovery. We are meant to make mistakes, find things we love, build friendships, and figure out who we want to become.
Instead, many of us seem to be spending those years trying to become employable.
Get a degree. Build projects. Learn new skills. Apply for jobs. Complete assessments. Get rejected. Start again.
And somewhere in between, we are supposed to enjoy our lives.
As someone studying IT and AI in Australia, I have been thinking about this through the experience of trying to enter the job market. I find myself wondering how much more a graduate is expected to do before being considered ready for an opportunity that is, by definition, supposed to be entry-level.
Reading other people’s experiences has made me realise that this frustration is bigger than one person’s career. It raises a question about what we now expect young people to accomplish before they can feel secure enough to start living.
The entry-level job that doesn’t feel entry-level
One of the strangest things about looking for your first professional job is that being a beginner no longer seems to be enough.
You have a degree, but employers want experience. You build projects, but other applicants have internships. You complete internships, but someone else has more relevant experience.
So you keep adding to your profile, hoping the next skill or project will finally make you competitive.
The difficult part is not simply that the process is competitive. It is that nobody tells you exactly when you have done enough.
When rejection comes without meaningful feedback, you begin questioning everything: your skills, your degree, your résumé, even whether you chose the right career.
I have experienced the frustration of working towards opportunities and trying to understand what I need to improve. Assessments can make this particularly difficult: you know you are being evaluated, but when you don’t get through, you may not know which gap mattered or how to fix it.
You are left trying to improve without knowing precisely what went wrong.
And the next application is already waiting.
We need experience to get experience
A university degree is supposed to prepare us for employment. Yet many graduates discover that the qualification alone is not enough.
We are advised to develop practical skills, build a portfolio, practise technical interviews and gain industry experience. Much of this is sensible advice. Employers need people who can apply what they have learned.
But when every graduate receives the same advice, doing all these things gradually becomes the baseline rather than the advantage.
There is also an assumption that everyone has equal opportunities to prepare. Some graduates can afford unpaid work or spend hours developing personal projects. Others are balancing university, part-time employment, rent and family responsibilities.
For international students, there may be another layer: visa conditions, limited time after graduation and the financial pressure of making an expensive education lead somewhere.
We often discuss employability as though it depends entirely on how much effort an individual invests.
It doesn’t.
What the numbers tell us, and what they don’t
Australia’s 2025 Graduate Outcomes Survey, published by the Australian Government’s Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching (QILT), found that 52.2% of international postgraduate coursework graduates were employed full-time, compared with 88.3% of domestic graduates, around four to six months after graduation.
The difference becomes particularly relevant when we look at computing. Among postgraduate coursework graduates in Computing and Information Systems, the full-time employment rate was 44.4% for international graduates, compared with 81.5% for domestic graduates.
Source: 2025 QILT Graduate Outcomes Survey: International Report.
These figures do not mean that every international IT graduate will struggle to find work. The report notes that differences in graduate outcomes are partly associated with factors such as international graduates being younger and more likely to continue into further full-time study. The figures measure employment, not necessarily employment in a graduate’s chosen profession.
Still, the gap is difficult to ignore.
The report also highlights a challenge that connects directly to the experience of building a future in Australia: among international postgraduate coursework graduates working in jobs below their skill level, lacking permanent residency was the most commonly reported reason, at 22.8%.
For international students, finding a job can mean more than starting a career. It can mean recovering financially from tuition fees, meeting living expenses, gaining relevant experience and determining whether staying in the country is realistic.
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A job application becomes a calculation about your future.
The loneliness of trying to get started
One part of job searching that deserves more attention is how privately people experience it.
You submit an application alone. You complete an assessment at your desk. You prepare for an interview, replay your answers afterwards and wait for a response. Sometimes you receive a rejection. Sometimes there is nothing.
Meanwhile, LinkedIn shows someone announcing a graduate position, another person celebrating an internship, and someone else starting at a company you hoped to join.
You see the achievement, not the full story behind it.
You don’t know how many applications they submitted, what support they had, how many interviews they failed, or whether an opportunity came through a connection. You only see that they have moved forward while you are still trying.
This makes it easy to interpret a difficult job market as a personal shortcoming.
Of course, sometimes an application needs improvement. Sometimes another candidate is better suited to a role. But without useful feedback, it is difficult to distinguish between a gap you can address and an outcome you could not have controlled.
When so much depends on securing that first opportunity, uncertainty becomes exhausting.
When self-improvement becomes an endless project
The pressure doesn’t stop at job applications. It begins to influence how we use the rest of our time.
A hobby becomes a potential side income. A personal project becomes a portfolio piece. Reading becomes professional development. Even meeting people can start to feel like networking.
There is nothing wrong with wanting our interests to lead somewhere. The problem begins when we feel that an activity is worthwhile only if it improves our future prospects.
What happens to the hobbies that never become profitable, the friendships that offer no professional advantage and the experiences that cannot be added to a résumé?
We postpone things until life settles down. We will travel after finding a job, return to our interests after securing an internship, and make more time for friends when university becomes less demanding.
But there is no guarantee that the next milestone will bring the certainty we are waiting for.
After the degree comes the job. Then financial stability, a house deposit, a promotion, another goal. Wanting these things is reasonable, but the conditions for finally feeling settled can keep changing.
We can spend years preparing for a better life while treating the present as something we must get through first.
Is the answer simply to work harder?
There is a legitimate argument that graduates can improve their chances by developing genuine skills, targeting employers carefully and presenting their experience effectively.
That advice matters. Individual effort can make a difference.
But when many qualified candidates compete for a limited number of entry-level positions, not everyone can stand out simply by doing more. And when opportunities depend on experience that beginners have not yet had the chance to acquire, the problem cannot be solved by telling every applicant to improve their résumé.
We can encourage people to take responsibility for their careers without treating every unsuccessful outcome as evidence that they have failed personally.
What are we actually working towards?
I don’t think the answer is to abandon ambition. Work matters. Financial independence matters. A stable future matters, especially when you are building a life in another country.
But if the purpose of getting a job is to support a good life, why does preparing for that job sometimes leave so little room for living?
We should be able to take our careers seriously without making them our entire identities. We should be able to learn without feeling permanently behind, pursue interests without turning them into income streams, and work towards a better future without treating every day of the present as disposable.
That requires more than an individual change in mindset. It requires recognising the pressures created by competitive recruitment, financial insecurity and the unequal circumstances in which people begin their careers.
It also requires us to stop measuring our lives exclusively through milestones.
Perhaps what worries me most is not that young people have to work hard. It is that so many feel they cannot afford to stop preparing, even briefly, without falling behind.
We are told that our twenties are the time to build a future. But they are also years of our lives, not a waiting room before adulthood begins.
And perhaps the question worth asking is not whether we are doing enough to prepare for adulthood, but why so many of us are doing everything we were told to do, yet still feel as though our lives have not properly begun.
