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