Last updated on October 30th, 2023 at 04:25 pm

Graduate employment is the worst since the 1992-93 recession, with only 71.3 per cent of bachelor degree graduates in work four months after completing their degree, according to a new report from Graduate Careers Australia.

The survey, taken last year, shows that the job market for graduates is far weaker than in 2012, when 76.1 per cent of new graduates were in work. It measures the number of bachelor degree graduates under the age of 25 with full-time jobs as a proportion of those available for full-time employment, four months after completing their course.

Graduate Careers executive director Noel Edge said that graduate employment was still affected by the 2008 ­global economic crisis but added that he believed longer-term job prospects for graduates remained strong.

The latest figures on the graduate labour market from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show graduate unemployment at 3.4 per cent in May 2013, compared to 7.8 per cent for those with no post-school education.

The report also shows that male graduates continue to earn more than female graduates, with women’s median earnings pegged at 94 per cent of male median earnings in their first job.

Dentists are the highest earners in their first job, with a median income of $80,000 a year, followed by opto­metrists at $70,000 a year.

While engineering graduates median income in their first job is lower at $64,000, mining continued to pay high salaries to graduates with mining engineers earning $95,000 a year in their first job.

LAW GRAD FULL-TIME EMPLOYMENT LOWEST ON RECORD

The extent of the deterioration in full-time work for professions such as law, accounting, engineering and computer science is starkly illustrated by the data.

The percentage of law graduates with a full-time job fell to 78.5 per cent in 2013 from 83 per cent the year before, the lowest since records were first kept in 1982.

This should sound alarm bells for universities, which have aggressively grown their law schools, and for current and recent law graduates, who cite a job market so glutted that law firms have their pick of the elite.

Those law graduates who do get a coveted position earn a median salary of $55,000.

In accounting, the percentage of graduates with full-time work fell to 77.4 per cent in 2013, the lowest employment rate since 1992.

The accounting industry, like law, is undergoing profound restructuring with a hollowing-out of graduate work that is being outsourced, off-shored and automated.

Labor has called for accounting to be taken off a list of in-demand occupations for skilled migrants, with the accounting bodies and universities continuing to claim there is a shortage of accountants in Australia.

The percentage of civil engineering graduates with full-time work fell to 85.4 per cent in 2013, a 5 percentage point drop from 2012 and the lowest level since 1994.

Even in computer science, a field where employers continually claim they cannot find suitable employees and graduates say they cannot find work, the full-time employment rate fell to 70.3 per cent, the lowest since 2004.

© The Australian Financial Review

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