Graduates waiting longest time to find work since 1994, survey reveals

More graduates are leaving full-time education without finding a job, a new survey from Graduate Careers Australia has revealed, with around 24% of graduates still looking for work four months after graduating.

The survey highlighted chronic skills shortages in technical areas such as engineering and IT, with recruitment experts saying SMEs should consider taking on newly-graduated talent despite the risks.

“There aren’t enough graduates in the technical sectors and there are quite significant shortfalls as well,” Skye Recruitment co-founder Kye MacDonald says.

The survey, which questioned more than 100,000 former university students, found that 76% found work after graduating in 2009 but 24% were still looking four months later.

That result is down by 10 percentage points from 2008, when 85.2% of graduates found work quickly – it is also the lowest rate since 1994.

The report suggested that blame for the movement could be placed on impacts of the GFC “bringing the slow upward trend seen since 2004 to a halt”.

Many professional firms reduced or scrapped graduate recruitment plans when the financial crisis took hold and that was especially true in the financial and accounting industries.

Pharmacy, medicine, dentistry, surveying and nursing sectors claimed the highest number of graduates.

Women were more likely to score a full-time job than men, with 76.8% of female graduates employed compared to 75.4% of men and it was also more likely that men would not be working while looking for a job.

Graduate Careers research director Bruce Guthrie said graduates holding degrees in sciences and humanities were more likely to wait a while to find a job.

Some of the highest numbers for graduates available for employment four months after graduating were found in the engineering and technical sectors.

The report comes as the government moves to address the looming skills shortage, unveiling a package of training measures in the most recent budget.

Many businesses have reduced graduate recruitment intake since the financial crisis and Kye MacDonald of Skye Recruitment – which deals with the engineering sector – says more SMEs should consider taking on workers straight out of university in order to train them.

“Of course it depends on your sector, on whether you should be hiring graduates or not. Certainly there aren’t enough graduates in the technical sectors…and many of our clients are quite keen to find them,” he says.

MacDonald says his company’s clients are so desperate for recruits that they pay Skye a fee to find them.

“Graduates are an income stream for us,” he says. “Many of our clients have quite structured graduate attraction programs as well.”

MacDonald acknowledged that there were risks associated with hiring graduates, with many companies finding they put money into training only to find that recruits leave at the end of the program. But MacDonald says benefits can be quite strong.

“If you take people on knowing there is a percentage of them that are going to leave there is an element of natural attrition there. There’s always that risk because graduates have never worked in the industry before,” he says.

The benefits of graduates can be numerous. They are willing to work for cheaper wages and often bring fresh knowledge and an objective view of the business.

“We take on graduates here and we have a block about to start next month. If I get three out of the four that I hire and they still want to do the job through all that training process, then I’m happy,” MacDonald says.