Graduate Recruitment Blog

Richard keeps writing them so we keep posting them, this story’s been published in the Canberra Times along with the Financial Review over the past week.

Graduates Turn to Canberra for Future Graduate Careers

Canberra is showing strong potential as a career destination for Australian University graduates according to new data released by careers website GradConnection.

From a national sample of 16,000 University graduates and students, a career in Government is the third most popular job choice across Australia, attracting 10.1% of those polled. More popular than a career in Government as a choice for grads are Accountancy (no. 1) and Engineering and Mining (no. 2).

However, among graduates attending Canberra universities, the number looking for a career in Government rockets to 23.6% and is by far the most popular career choice. Following Government, the most popular careers for Canberra-educated graduates are the IT industry (10.9%), Accounting (9%) and Law (7.9%).

Also pointing to good news for Canberra are the numbers of university graduates who regard Canberra as potentially a good place to work. Of the 16,000 graduates in the GradConnection poll, just 3% are from Canberra. But among the other 97% in the poll, 18% are open to the idea of their future career being in Canberra.

“The data suggests that Canberra is a more popular option for graduates to start their careers than has been previously thought,” said GradConnection director Dan Purchas. “It makes sense that graduates looking for careers in Government would consider Canberra as a good place to work, but the City is also appearing prominently in our data among some other major professions.”

If you want to find out more about Richard check him out @ www.rmgcoms.com.au, you can also follow him on twitter @richardmcg.

GradConnection – Home of the Canberra GradMaker and Government GradMaker.

I ended up being a bit under the weather last week so the blog post from last week is now this weeks blog post.

While I was off work recuperating, I started thinking again about our very first blog post which looked at the most popular location for graduate jobs in Australia. Our very first blog post was about how Melbourne was the most attractive city for graduate job hunters and re-reading it over the week got me thinking about how ready Australian graduates are to relocate for their first graduate job on leaving university.

From that first blog post we found that 55% of graduate job hunters were interested in Melbourne as a place to take up their first graduate position. This fact gets even more interesting when you consider that only 30% of the visitors to our site were actually based in Melbourne to begin with.

Relocate? Sure why not

To take things a step further I thought it would be interesting to have a look at how many graduates were interested in relocating to multiple cities after they had finished up at university, so as you do when you’re sick, I ended up sitting down and hitting our database to see how many graduates were interested in relocating to secure their first graduate job and the results were as follows:

Relocation Locations	% of Graduate Respondents
3	39.5%
2	16.5%
1	44%

The Breakdown

This is an interesting insight into the attitude of graduates as they are searching for their first graduate job as it shows 3 distinct mindsets.

Firstly there are the 44% of grads who only want to work in one location after they finish their university studies. My thinking on this is that these graduates either want to work and live in their home town or the town they have relocated to for university.

The next group which accounts for 16% of graduates are interested in moving to 2 locations. I think this shows that these graduates have relocated for university and would want to either stay where they are studying or return to their home town.

The remaining 39% of graduates are out to work in 3 or more locations after they finish studying which shows that a large proportion of graduates coming out of university in Australia are very flexible and are keen to do whatever it takes to find a good opportunity. I think this is the group I would have fallen into when I finished studying at university as I was keen to move anywhere  I could secure an opportunity, I even considered going to Norway at one point.

Summing Up

So it seems that the majority of Australian graduates, 56% to be precise, are motivated to relocate once they finish studying which is a good sign for locations such as Western Australia, Queensland and Canberra as these centres do have a high demand for graduates but don’t’ have the largest numbers of graduates studying there compared to Sydney and Melbourne.

Well its been just about 2 months since the main careers fair season has ended for 2009 and last week we received an interesting email provided by the Australian Association of Graduate Employers (AAGE). For the first time ever the AAGE has analysed attendances at the careers fairs that have been held at universities across Australia.

Careers Fairs Statistics

The report has given us some interesting stats about the amount of organisations looking to hire graduates as well as which universities seem to be the most popular amongst graduate employers.

• 596 different organisations attended careers fairs in 2009 – most were companies that are recruiting directly but there are a small number of Associations and other organisations (like us) that do not directly employ graduates.

• 40 careers fairs were held nationwide – between 3rd March and the 8th of April. An interesting point to note is that some of the major graduate programs closed their applications before the end of the careers fair season meaning many of the Queensland careers fairs aren’t utilised by some organisations’ graduate recruitment drives.

• The most careers fairs attended by one organisation was 35 out of 40 and on average organisations attended 4.25 careers fairs each.

Careers Fair Attendance Spread

Another interesting stat was the amount of careers fairs that were attended by employers, with nearly half attending just one university careers fair.

• 70 organisations attended 10 or more careers fairs; We think this stat shows that even though the economy is not in the best shape there are still a large number of organisations that are looking to hire substantial numbers of graduates from all over Australia.

• 248 organisations attended between 2 and 9 careers fairs; this seems to indicate that there are a serious amount of organisations at the state level that are on the hunt for good graduates for midsized graduate programs and smaller amounts of graduate jobs.

• 278 organisations went to only 1 careers fair; it’s interesting to see that there are a large number of presumably smaller employers that are actively getting out and promoting themselves in the graduate market.

Careers Fairs By State

In terms of employers, it appears that the Victorian university careers fairs are most popular to attend with an average of 76 organisations attending. The University of Melbourne took the honours of having the most graduate employers attend their careers fair in 2009 with 146 employers.

• Western Australia – total of 4, biggest fair was Curtin with 106, average was 65 graduate employers per careers fair
• Victoria, total of 8 – Biggest was Melbourne Uni with 146, average was 76 graduate employers per careers fair
• South Australia – total of 6, biggest was Uni of South Australia with 89, average was 48 gradaute employers per careers fair
• New South Wales – total of 10, biggest was UNSW with 118, average was 65 graduate employers per careers fair
• Queensland total of 9 – biggest was Uni of Queensland with 137, average was 63 graduate employers per careers fair
• Tasmania – one fair only with 43 graduate employers attending
• Northern Territory – one fair only with 37
• Canberra – one fair only combining 3 universities of students with 68 graduate employers attending

Our Experiences at University Careers Fairs 2009

It was our first time out on the campaign trail and we attended 15 careers fairs in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney, Newcastle, Brisbane and Canberra. The best fairs that we attended in terms of layout and the amount of grads we spoke to were probably the NSW Big Meet and the Monash Careers Fair, even though Monash was 6 hours long! We have to give an honourable mention to the Queensland fairs we attended due to the fact that it gave us a good excuse to go to Dreamworld : )

2010 Careers Fairs and Beyond

It would be interesting to compare next years careers fair attendances with that of 2009. Anecdotally we have heard that a lot of employers pulled back on the number of careers fairs they attended in 2009 but we are unable to come to any measurable conclusion.

We were generally surprised to see the number of graduate employers that went to only 1 careers fair, evidence of very targeted graduate attraction marketing. Are companies going to continue with the shot-gun approach to graduate recruitment? Or are we going to see careers fairs continue to be come more localised?

We have heard the figure that 1 in 4 final year students attend their university careers fair but this figure is subject to verification. Can anyone shed light on the percentage of grads that attend these fairs and whether or not this has increased or decreased during tense economic times?

With the careers fair season largely over for 2009 and many of the major graduate recruitment campaigns closed for applications we’ve had a chance to review some of the things graduates have been telling us about what they are looking for in an employer.

One of the most interesting aspects that we’ll be taking a look into for this blog post has been the locations that graduates are looking to start their careers in 2010.

So where do Australian graduates want to work in 2010?

Over March and April we had 7,937 graduates that visited our website tell us the top 3 locations in Australia they were interested in working after they graduate and move to the work force in 2010.

Here is an overview of the top 5 ranking cities that graduates are hoping to find work in 2010:

City	Number of Responses	Percentage of Responses
Melbourne	4,381	55.20%
Sydney	3,901	49.15%
Brisbane	1,875	23.62%
Canberra	1,416	17.84%
Perth	1,124	14.16%

The biggest surprise in the data we have collected is that Melbourne is a more popular work destination for Australian graduates than Sydney, by a margin of just over 6% of respondents.

The second major surprise was the popularity of Canberra as a desirable work destination for graduates as there seems to be a well attached negative stigma about Canberra as a destination for graduates.

Where are Graduates located during their job hunt?

To put the figures above into perspective we need to look at where these graduates are currently based. After reviewing the GradConnection web server logs we have had 21,205 graduates visit the site and here is a breakdown of where in Australia they come from:

City	Graduate Visitors	Percentage of Visitors
Sydney	8,418	39.70%
Melbourne	6,870	32.40%
Brisbane	2,253	10.62%
Perth	1,372	6.47%
Adelaide	874	4.12%
Canberra	765	3.61%
Hobart	238	1.12%

Where our traffic has come from largely matches up to the population distribution of the major Australian cities so it seems to be a good representation of graduates around Australia.

Over 70% of grads came from Sydney and Melbourne with 40% and 32% respectively.

One interesting feature was the fact that over 1400 graduates wanted to work in Canberra, however we only had around 750 graduate visitors from Canberra visit the site overall.

So Melbourne Takes the Honours

So it seems that graduates are more than willing to move from where they are currently based in order to land their first job. It might also be a wise move for employers with graduate positions in Melbourne to promote the fact that the roles they have available are in Melbourne as it may attract more graduates to apply.

Thats all for the graduate recruitment blog for now but we have a stack of other blog topics that will be coming regularly over the next few months. Feel free to send any feedback or if you would like us to cover a specific topic fire an email to danp@gradconnection.com