The challenges of educated young women in the labour market : A review of perceptions and experiences of young women graduates in accessing formal employment in private sector

Young people are often depicted as people with full potential for increasing productivity but with less opportunities of accessing the labor market. This paper explores the employment experiences of YWGs, with particular focus on formal employment in the large scale private sector in Uganda. YWGs are significant in this paper because they find themselves in a difficult situation after university where society has expectations from them as women and they also have their own aspirations that are to a certain extent reinforced by the changing development processes and contradictory to the society. Young people have hopes in employment as the only avenue to satisfy their consumption tendencies and short of that, they will have to adjust their expectations. But being the "pillars of tomorrow‘s Uganda", it matters for YWGs to be offered job opportunities at an early stage before engaging into the reproductive activities in order to realize their contribution to the country‘s development. However, it is alleged by some employers and scholars that some YWGs have low levels of confidence that delay their access to the labor market. Therefore, the research has examined the different hiring experiences among the human resource managers and their implications to the opportunities and actions of YWGs looking for formal employment using mainly semi-structured interviews. I have argued that the reasons for not accessing formal private sector employment are profoundly embedded in the nature and environment of many large scale private organizations, and thus simplistic solutions may not yield any result. The paper has adopted the comparative theoretical approach in examining the complexities in the subject matter. Many aspects of graduate unemployment experiences, formal and informal gender discriminations at organizational levels have been discovered. The way employers select recruiting methods has significant conjectural and realistic insinuations for understanding labor markets and disparity.