A-Level results have just been released, and most JC3 students who have been scouring through scholarship and university guides finding the perfect university course may have landed themselves on the page labelled “Starting Salaries for Certain Occupations”.
If the prospect of getting rich is your definition of a “perfect university course”, be sure to find yourself a course that could possibly ease your path into something related to information and digital technologies.
No, not business. Not even if you’re this lady:
The statistics for median salaries and unemployment rates among fresh graduates for last year are out, and may or may not look promising in some ways.
A Hike in Unemployment
Unfortunately, getting a degree doesn’t necessarily guarantee happily ever after with rainbows and unicorns.
Many still struggle finding full-time employment even as long as six months after they’ve graduated.
According to the 2022 Joint Autonomous Universities Graduate Employment Survey, 93.8% of the 10,700 fresh graduates currently in the workforce surveyed managed to obtain jobs within the first six months post graduation. The percentage fell from 94.4% in 2021.
This is interesting: given that 2021 was the COVID-19 year, so shouldn’t it be the other way around?
It turned out that more people preferred to freelance instead.
The number of freelancers in the labour force has seen a slight increase from 1.7% in the previous year to 1.8% in 2022.
87.5% of the proportion who managed to secure a job in the workforce within six months were full-timers, a rise from 84% in 2021, while those who embarked on part-time or temporary work comprised 4.5% of that proportion, down from 8.7% in 2021.
Additionally, according to another follow-up survey, fewer graduates from courses that required post-graduate practical training in order to enter professional practice gained employment in 2022 compared to the previous year, from 98.1% to 97.4%.
94.9% of them went into full-time employment in 2022, a drop from 2021’s percentage of 96%. Similar to those who did not undergo post graduate training, the percentage of freelancers rose from 0.3% to 0.8%.
Fewer people might be joining the workforce, but in general, the median gross monthly salary of those who worked in full-time and permanent jobs increased.
For fresh graduates who were fortunate to find jobs within six months, their median gross month salary rose from $3,800 in 2021 to $4,200 in 2022. Win-win situation, perhaps?
Information and digital technologies takes the crown for the highest increase in its median gross month salary from the previous year, from $5,000 in 2021 to $5,625 in 2022.
This is despite the fact that tech firms are laying off people in recent months; watch this video to learn more about this phenomenon:
This, along with health sciences and engineering, saw the greatest rise in the number of full-time permanent employees in each sector.
For those who had to undergo post-graduate training, they too at least saw a considerably large increase in their median gross monthly salary from $5,000 in 2021 to $5,500 in 2022.
So, if you still have absolutely no idea what to do in university (don’t worry, we’re all a little indecisive sometimes!) take this as a TLDR guide.