GCCA | Graduate Careers Council of Australia

Graduate Careers Australia

ergo - Number 90 March 2003

Graduate Employment and Salaries in 2002

Each year, the Graduate Careers Council of Australia (GCCA) administers the Graduate Destination Survey (GDS), a national survey of graduate employment and salary outcomes, and reports on its findings. The first view of these results was given in the recent release of

The Grad Files, a summary of the most important findings about the activities of the previous cohort.

The Grad Files is an easy-to-read report developed for the general public and other interested parties to get a quick overview of the GDS findings; the report is available as a free pdf, downloadable from the section of this site called "The Grad Files" .

Graduate Market Tougher in 2002

In 2002, the graduate market appeared to be a little tougher than in the previous couple of years, with a small decrease in employment levels across the board reflecting the political and economic disturbances of the past eighteen months. The volume of new bachelor degree graduates finding work in the first few months following completion of their degree fell to 81.3 percent in 2002 (compared to 83.0 percent in 2001). Of these, the number of males seeking full-time employment was equivalent to the number of females, a change from previous years when males were less likely to be doing so than females.

Postgraduate Study

Postgraduate study is emerging as an increasingly important option for graduates, with almost one quarter of the respondents (24.1 percent) indicating that they were enrolled in further study at the time of the survey. Once again, Dentistry was the most lucrative profession for graduates in terms of median starting salaries, with Medicine, Optometry, Engineering and Computer Science among the top five as per the previous four years in Australia.

Comparative Salaries Fall...

Graduate starting salaries also dipped significantly during this year compared to Average Weekly Earnings (AWE), as the attached graph shows (download the graph from the link at the bottom of the page). The significant fall of median graduate starting salaries to 82.8% of AWE, is a reversal of the previous year, where graduate starting salaries rose to 85.8% of AWE.

...But Rise From 2001 Levels

However, the overall median starting salary did rise by $500 to $35,500 in 2002, a slight increment from the previous year perhaps reflecting the so-called “war for talent”. The effect here is that the relatively fewer job opportunities are to an extent counter-balanced by higher salaries to those that are employed, as companies seek out the “brightest and best” graduates. Despite these fluctuations, it is evident that the earning capacity of graduates is still quite favourable compared to the rest of the labour market, particularly as salary levels for the entire workforce now include the earnings of several decades worth of past graduates.

Download The Grad Files Now

If you want to find out more about the results of the 2002 Graduate Destination Survey, download The Grad Files

View the graph depicting Starting Salaries related to AWE below: