Graduate Careers Australia
The Graduate Grapevine - Number 1, September 2005
2004 Survey Reports: First Release
Graduate Careers Australia (GCA) has released the first of its 2004 reports in the last few weeks: Graduate Destinations, 2004; Graduate Starting Salaries, 2004; and Graduate Course Experience, 2004.
Graduate Destinations, 2004 suggests that the proportion of graduates entering professional level employment differs depending on their field of education, which can have a notable effect on the level of work they enter immediately after study.
Of all bachelor degree graduates in full-time employment, 67.6 per cent were employed professionally, 5.3 per cent were in management and administration, a further 11.7 per cent were in a para-professional position (often a stepping stone to professional level employment) and 14.0 per cent were working in a clerical, sales or service related job.
Fields with lower proportions entering professional level employment often represent more diverse areas of study with less clearly defined career paths (such as Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and Business, Economics) or where entry level work to the profession is more diverse (such as Agriculture and Law, Legal Studies).
According to GCA’s new Graduate Starting Salaries, 2004 report on the earnings of recent university graduates, the median annual starting salary for bachelor degree graduates commencing full-time work in 2004 was $38,000 (up from $37,000 in 2003). The table attached shows starting salaries and their rankings by Field of Education (further salary information by Field of Education can be found in GradStats 2004, available in the ‘What Job for You’ section of GCA’s website).
GCA has released another new report, Graduate Course Experience, 2004, which notes that 68 per cent of bachelor degree graduates agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that “Overall, I was satisfied with the quality of this course”. This survey is used by universities to seek the opinions of recent graduates and looks for ways to improve the quality of the higher education experience.
All three reports are available for purchase on the GCA website.
The Higher Education Advantage
The Graduate Destinations, 2004 report indicates that graduates in some Fields of Education (such as the Humanities and some areas of Science) take longer to find full-time employment than graduates of other Fields.
However, the most recently published figures looking at the population as a whole (collected by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in May 2004) show that only 2.9 per cent of bachelor degree graduates in the Australian labour force were unemployed, compared with eight per cent of those who had not completed a post-secondary education and 5.6 per cent of all persons.
Bruce Guthrie, Research Manager GCA
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