Technology news and Jobs 
Technology people Do computer science grads find jobs?
Technology people Do computer science grads find jobs? | Do computer science grads find jobs? |
|
| by Stephen Withers | |
| Friday, 27 July 2007 | |
  
Featured Whitepaper
5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support
Most popular skills tags.NET Active Directory C# Cisco Development HTML Infrastructure Management Network Oracle Project Management SAP SDLC SQL Server Support Sybase TCP/IP Unix VB.NET Web Services/SOAP XMLFirstly, relatively few - 13 percent - computer science students undertook further full-time study. This is the lowest proportion among the sciences, with more than 50 percent of chemistry and physical sciences graduates staying on. On the other hand, it's substantially more than urban and regional planners (7 percent), social workers (6.9 percent), civil engineers (5.4 percent) and vets (3.8 percent). When the other categories such as "unavailable for full-time study or full-time employment" are taken out, 76.8 percent of computer science graduates were available for full-time work. Of those, 78.8 percent were in full-time employment at the time of the survey (approximately four months after course completion) - that's just 60.5 percent of computer science graduates. Another 8.8 percent were unemployed. Keeping in mind that we're now only talking about graduates available for full-time work, that compares badly with an overall figure of 5.5 percent, all engineering disciplines (especially mining engineers' zero unemployment, presumably due to the minerals boom in Western Australia), most health-related courses, accounting and economics. If we just look at the proportion of graduates available and looking for full-time work, the overall figure is 17.6 percent. Computer Scientists are again worse than average on 21.2 percent, but that's better than life sciences (25.8 percent) and physical sciences (26.7 percent). No prizes for guessing the disciplines with the highest levels of unemployment: visual and performing arts (37.8 percent), followed by social sciences (29.7 percent). Despite the way federal and state governments encourage the study of languages other than English, language graduates do badly too, with 27.7 percent looking for full-time work - the same as humanities graduates, and almost the same as psychologists (27.9 percent). So despite the alleged skills shortage in IT, a computer science degree isn't looking like a meal ticket: less than two-thirds of new graduates were in full-time work at the time of the survey, and their salaries are only just above the average for all graduates. Add the fact that only just over half of computer science graduates were working as computer professionals, and the outlook seems even less rosy. |
Tags
| < Next story in category | Previous story in the category > |
|---|
