Written by Tsz Kit (Jason) Law
Decision-making, it’s a process some people will struggle with because of their nervousness and uncertainty. But, sometimes good decision can positively influence your life, while a bad decision can hamper it. Graduation from school represents an end to the first-stage of life’s journey. The cruel fact is that life turns into another mode, and post-graduate students have to make their own decision on creating the pathways for a bright future. Also, the life transformation from university to the workforce is unimaginable because of an unknown work routine, and living habits. As the period of stepping into the workforce is unclear, the process of finding a full-time employment job can be harder than expected.
Why it is hard to get full-time employment after completion? What are the concerns of a post-graduate student regarding the decision of getting a job? What about unbalanced income, or the difficulty of finding an ideal job of themselves? From the survey research of QILT in 2018, there are more than 120,000 students who graduated from university in the 2018 academic year, and surprisingly over half of them got a job after four months of graduating from university.
According to the statistics of full-time employment rates of post-graduate students in 2018, 73% of post-graduate students successfully found full-time employment. However the few percentages of unemployed students are due to the difficulty of finding full-time employment in a specific field of industry. Therefore, there is a big difference between the courses when comparing the employment rate and salary. For example, students who are studying creative arts are at the bottom line of the full-time employment rate by receiving only 52.2%. Due to the specific characteristics of some industries, part-time or freelance employees are more likely to receive a higher income by taking freelance jobs, such as art and creative industry. Sadly, for the students who are studying a media and communication degree, the full-time employment rate of 2018 has only achieved 60.5%, which is one of the bottom five areas of study for the employment rate.
For the industry, the data mentions that the job quality of post-graduate students who have graduated from professional courses was higher than expected, such as accounting, and medical courses. It is because the assessment work of those areas of study are closely related to the job features, and students can catch up and rapidly get used to their position. For example, nursing students will attend and work in a hospital as a placement assessment in order to get familiar with the things that relate to their work. On the other hand, those students who have not graduated from professional areas of study, reported that they couldn’t ‘fully-use’ the skills that they learnt from university and apply them in the workforce, thus finding it harder to get used to the work environment.
To the end, these tips and statistics that mentioned before may help undergraduate students with understanding the struggle of entering into the workforce, and better influence their decision-making when creating their career pathways.