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What do graduates do? (Winter 08/09)
- What Do Graduates Do?
- Summary
- Falling unemployment – at least up to early 2008
- Types of jobs and industry sectors
- Destinations by subject areas
- How much do they earn?
- HND and foundation degree
- Conclusion
- Further information
What Do Graduates Do?
Summary
Pearl Mok (HECSU) presents some key findings of the research into the destinations of graduates from 2007. At the start of 2008, more graduates were in employment than a year ago and unemployment also saw a fall. There was a year-on-year drop in graduates going into the finance industries, despite more graduates being employed as chartered accountants and financial analysts. More graduates were also entering the arts and media, social and health professions.
Our latest annual What Do Graduates Do? research is a study of graduates from 2007 and what they were doing at the beginning of 2008. There were 264,050 first degree graduates from 2007, up 1,000 (0.4%) from the previous year. Just under 80% (209,120 graduates) responded to the Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education (DLHE) survey six months following graduation, which formed the basis for our research.
At the time when the data was being collected, the credit crisis was only beginning to surface, and the job market which the 2007 cohort entered was still relatively stable. In this article, we report some of the key findings of this research, including comparisons with some of the figures from previous years.
Falling unemployment – at least up to early 2008
Figure 1 shows a broad breakdown of the early destinations of graduates from 2007. Our study revealed that graduate unemployment, at least up until early 2008, continued to be low: only 5.5% of graduates from 2007 were still looking for work six months after graduation, compared with 6% for the 2006 graduate cohort a year ago. Accompanying this drop in unemployment was a corresponding increase in those working and/or continuing with their study.
Figure 1. Destinations of first degree graduates from 2007, six months following graduation
Types of jobs and industry sectors
The number of graduates from 2007 going into business and financial professional jobs rose by over 1,000 (8.8%) compared with the previous year. Chartered accountants, financial analysts and personnel and recruitment consultants, in particular, have seen significant increases in numbers. However, if we look at the numbers going into the finance industry, as opposed to working in financial types of jobs, graduates entering the finance industry sector actually dropped by 2.7%, following a 1.1% increase in 2005/06.
Apart from business and financial professional jobs, more graduates from 2007 were also going into:
- Arts, design, culture and sports professions (up by over 800 graduates), including fine art and graphic artists, journalists and editors, and sports instructors.
- Social and welfare professions (up by just under 700 graduates), in particular social workers, housing and welfare officers, education/learning support workers, and psychologists, although there were fewer probation officers. On the whole, the number of graduates going into social work has doubled since 2004.
- Health professions (up by over 500 graduates), including nurses (although not non-hospital nurses which have seen a year-on-year fall in numbers), and physiotherapists. Following a shortage of physiotherapist posts a year ago, the situation has improved slightly for 2007 graduates. There were also 1,280 more graduates employed as nurses compared with 2004 – a 43.7% rise.
- Other professionals, associate professionals and technical jobs (up by over 350), including architects, surveyors and laboratory technicians.
On the other hand, fewer 2007 graduates have entered commercial, industrial and public sector management (down by 450 graduates). There were also fewer (by around 2,000) graduates going into clerical, catering, retail and customer service types of ‘non-graduate’ jobs.
Table 1 compares the types of jobs that 2004 and 2007 graduates working in the UK went into, six months following graduation. In addition, using the graduate job classifications developed by Elias and Purcell1, between 2004 and 2007, not only have employment and unemployment remained stable, there has also been a steady increase in the percentages of graduates working in graduate-level occupations six months following graduation, from 60.9% in 2004 to 66.5% in 2007 – an indication that the graduate labour market, at least in 2006/07, has not yet reached saturation.
| Types of jobs | Graduates from 2004 | Graduates from 2007 |
| Marketing, Sales and Advertising Professionals | 4.3% | 4.8% |
| Commercial, Industrial and Public Sector Managers | 9.8% | 9.2% |
| Scientific Research, Analysis & Development Professionals | 1.1% | 1.1% |
| Engineering Professional | 2.9% | 3.4% |
| Health Professionals and Associate Professionals | 12.8% | 13.5% |
| Education Professionals | 6.7% | 6.8% |
| Business and Financial Professionals and Associate Professionals | 7.2% | 8.7% |
| Information Technology Professionals | 3.9% | 3.7% |
| Arts, Design, Culture and Sports Professionals | 5.1% | 6.4% |
| Legal Professionals | 0.7% | 0.8% |
| Social & Welfare Professionals | 3.3% | 4.2% |
| Other Professionals, Associate Professional and Technical Occupations | 5.3% | 5.7% |
| Numerical Clerks and Cashiers | 3.4% | 2.4% |
| Other Clerical and Secretarial Occupations | 12.3% | 9.7% |
| Retail, Catering, Waiting and Bar Staff | 8.7% | 8.7% |
| Other Occupations | 12.3% | 10.8% |
| Unknown Occupations | 0.2% | 0.1% |
| All Occupations | 100.0% | 100.0% |
| Number of graduates employed in the UK | 143285 | 147315 |
Destinations by subject areas
Most subject areas followed the general trend of a year-on-year drop in unemployment although there were a few exceptions.
Arts and humanities
The percentage of modern languages graduates who were unemployed six months following graduation fell from 5.9% in 2006 to 5.2% in 2007, below the average of 5.5% for all first degree subjects. Unemployment for history graduates also fell, from 6.3% in 2006 to 5.9% in 2007. More graduates from these subjects were opting for further study.
Business and management
The number of business and management graduates fell by 650 (3.3%) from 19,590 in 2006 to 18,940 in 2007.
Almost three quarters (73.7%) of marketing graduates were employed in the UK six months after graduation, well above the average figure for all first degree graduates. A third of these graduates (33.3%) were in marketing, sales or advertising professions, another one in six (16.8%) were in commercial or public sector management and just under one in ten (9.4%) were working as business or financial professionals.
Engineering
The number of civil engineering graduates rose by almost a fifth (18.8%) between 2006 and 2007. Fewer graduates, however, were out of work: 2.4% in 2007 compared with 3.4% in 2006. In the same period, the number of architecture and building graduates rose by 8.6%, and unemployment also fell from 3.4% to 2.9%.
Unemployment for electrical and electronic engineering graduates dropped from 9.5% in 2006 to 7.7% in 2007. Although this was above the average of 5.5% for all first degree subjects, it was well below the 12.7% level in 2003.
Although the engineering industry is often associated with skills shortages, the number of graduates going into engineering jobs has actually risen by 22.1% since 2004.
IT
There were over 2,100 fewer IT graduates in 2007, a year-on-year drop of 14.1%. Unemployment went down from 10.4% in 2006 to 9.5% in 2007, which was well below the 2003 figure of 12.1%.
Science
Environmental sciences saw a year-on-year drop of 450 graduates (11.7%) in 2007. Unemployment, however, also declined from 6.1% in 2006 to 5% in 2007, below the 5.5% average for all first degree subjects.
Other science subjects also saw a year-on-year drop in unemployment: biology from 7.9% to 6.7%, physics from 8.2% to 7%, and sports science from 4.9% to 3.9%. Chemistry was an exception, with unemployment increasing from 5.9% in 2006 to 6.2% in 2007.
Social sciences
Economics, law, politics, psychology and sociology all experienced a year-on-year drop in unemployment. More geography graduates, however, were out of work six months after graduation: 5.3% in 2007 compared with 3.8% in 2006 - a significant rise but still below the 5.5% figure for all first degree graduates.
How much do they earn?
Amongst first degree graduates working full time in the UK who have reported their salaries in the DLHE survey, the average salary was £19,300, an increase of 4.3% from the previous year’s figure of £18,501. Unsurprisingly, graduates working in London reported the highest mean salary at £22,479, followed by those working in the South East, at £19,306. Although salaries in Northern Ireland (£17,371) and Yorkshire and the Humber (£17,470) were the lowest amongst all UK regions, these regions also have lower costs of living.
The highest average salary by types of jobs was reported by protective service officers (£25,053), which include those working in the armed and police forces. Health professionals, including doctors, dentists, psychologists and pharmacists, commanded the second highest average salary, at £24,968. Occupations with salaries at the lower end include administrative work, with pay typically around £15,000 to £16,000.
HND and foundation degree
Foundation degree is an increasingly important qualification in the higher education agenda. The number of foundation degree qualifiers rose by 30.7% from 7,915 in 2006 to 10,350 in 2007, whilst the number of HND qualifiers fell by 13.1% from 6,315 to 5,490.
Just under one in five (17.9%) foundation degree qualifiers completed their course in education – the most popular of all subjects. This was followed by design studies, social work, computer science and business studies. For HND qualifiers, the most popular subject was business studies (accounting for 11.8% of HND qualifers), followed by computer science, management studies, information studies and design studies.
Over a third (35.8%) of HND and foundation degree qualifiers from 2007 progressed on to a first degree. Of those who were working in the UK, one in seven (14.8%) entered childcare and related personal services types of jobs, and one in ten (10.4%) were employed as commercial, industrial and public sector managers.
Conclusion
Graduates from 2007 entered the job market at a time when it was still enjoying growth and buoyancy. The economy has experienced a significant downturn since and unemployment has been rising. According to the Local Government Association, the construction and manufacturing industries, which showed the greatest decline in the 1990-92 recession, are likely to be the hardest hit, whilst high skilled industries look set to remain relatively unscathed2. It is anticipated that any major impact of the economic downturn and recession on graduate recruitment is likely to be reflected in the destinations of 2008 and 2009 graduates.
Further information
What Do Graduates Do? is available at http://www.prospects.ac.uk/links/WDGD. Alternatively, you can download the PDF from http://www.hecsu.ac.uk/hecsu.rd/research_reports_290.htm
1. SOC(HE): a classification of occupations for studying the graduate labour market, Peter Elias and Kate Purcell, 2004. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/ier/research/completed/7yrs2/rp6.pdf
2. From recession to recovery: the local dimension, LGA, November 2008. http://www.lga.gov.uk/lga/aio/1215871
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