Breaking down the Top 100 Graduate Employers 2018 report

The Australian Financial Review and GradConnection recently released their joint publication: Top 100 Graduate Employers 2018, which contains various infographics, testimonials and articles. The hero data of the report is the list of the top 100 graduate employers, with some familiar faces at the top.

There is plenty of content to work through and for those short on time, we’ve collated a cheat sheet to ensure you’ve got all the important bits.

The list

As it is every year, the top 100 list of graduate employers is the major hook in the report, with the potential to shape where grads at the top of the pecking order choose to go. The survey was conducted through the GradConnection website and included 34,186 respondents.

Unsurprisingly, the Big Four accounting firms featured prominently at the pointy end, with EY (fifth), Deloitte (third) and KPMG (second) all falling short to number one ranked rival PwC. This left IBM (fourth) as the only organisation beyond the Big Four to feature in the top five.

There were some significant jumps throughout the top 100. Commonwealth Bank of Australia leapt 11 places to 19, up from 30 in 2017. Communications company Dentsu Aegis Network slotted in at 22 despite not making the list at all last year, while NBN rose from 67 to 16 and the NSW Government leaped from 40 to 12 on the back of projected $72.7 billion spending on infrastructure in the next three years.

Era of the all-rounder

This section analyses how organisations' expectations of employees have transitioned from a STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) skillset to STEAM (the addition of arts). Effectively, businesses want candidates who are not only analytical and technically equipped but creative too, with appropriate soft skills like problem solving and communication. This shift towards hiring those with arts qualifications is not aligned with a specific major or degree, but with the broader thinking that these graduates are inclined to demonstrate. As KPMG Head of Talent Acquisition Phil Rutherford puts it, “scientists and engineers tend to reduce challenges to ones and zeros.”

The gender gap

It’s good news for women in the wage equality battle, with survey results showing the gender pay gap has dropped significantly, from 6.4 per cent in 2016 to 1.9 per cent in 2017.

There was also good news on the engineering front – though typically a boys’ club and the number one employer of male graduates (17.9 per cent), it appears female first-year engineers actually earn $65,000 on average, compared with $63,500 for men.

Overall, women outstrip men when it comes to university qualifications, with 45.1 per cent of females between the age of 25 and 35 holding a bachelors degree or higher, while for males, that figure is lagging behind at 33.7 per cent.

The state of employment

There were plenty of interesting statistics to take away from this infographic that presents a positive perception of the current grad job market. It requires an average of nine job applications before landing a job, with half of graduates planning to stay with that employer for more than five years.

When it came to readiness for the job search process, 47.6 per cent of graduates considered themselves well prepared by their university, with 20.3 per cent responding very well and 27.6 per cent saying not well.

Medicine was the top-ranked study area for full-time employment with 96 per cent, pipping pharmacy with 95 per cent. Creative arts had the lowest figure with 53 per cent, while mining was comfortably deemed the best-paying industry with an average of $104,000, a far cry from bottom-ranked telecommunications and manufacturing (both $63,000).

Grad preparedness

As mentioned above, barely 20 per cent of graduates believed their university had prepared them ‘very well’ for their job search, which is part of the concerning discrepancy between “what the universities offer, what employers want and what graduates feel they’ve paid for.”

However, this tells a different story to the survey conducted by Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching (QILT), which revealed 80 per cent of grads felt well prepared and nine out of 10 employers agreed.

A major point to come out of this piece was the strong demand for graduates who can code across all industries. GradConnection described it as a “skill that is a certainty for a job for life” and top-ranked law firm King & Wood-Mallesons is even offering coding classes for successful candidates.

Find out more about grad programs for your students at the ACS Seminars in Sydney, hosted by The Commonwealth Bank of Australia. They will be on hand to answer your questions and provide insight into Australia’s corporate landscape.