Many new graduates struggle to cultivate gainful opportunities and make progress toward their long-term career goals after university. Drawing from the "mindsets of opportunity" framework (O'Keefe et al., 2023), we investigate whether a novel intervention that fosters a growth mindset of opportunity—the belief that opportunities in life are changeable, not fixed—can help new graduates thrive.


In a randomized controlled field experiment, we recruited 224 new university graduates in the South West of England. Around their time of graduation, participants were randomly assigned to complete a 30-minute online module designed to inculcate the belief that opportunities in life are not fixed, but can be cultivated (growth-mindset-of-opportunity intervention) or that addressed sources of life satisfaction (active control condition). Ten months post-treatment, participants completed follow-up assessments of their current job position, career goal progress, and mindsets.


The intervention showed several direct benefits to participants' mindset and career progress. Critically, participants in the intervention conditioned had adopted a significantly stronger growth mindset of opportunity, relative to the control condition. Moreover, they reported significantly greater progress toward their long-term career goals since graduation, which was mediated by their stronger growth mindset.


The intervention also had several significant indirect effects—via a stronger growth mindset of opportunity—on the quality of graduates' current job (51.9% were employed full-time). Specifically, the intervention indirectly led to participants having jobs that (a) offered greater upward mobility in their organization, (b) provided greater job satisfaction and (c) were perceived as more relevant to their long-term career goals.


These effects generalized across degrees, gender, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity. Taken together, our findings demonstrate how adaptive beliefs about the malleability of opportunity, and a brief growth-mindset-of-opportunity intervention, can help new graduates thrive, create better opportunities toward a more equitable future.