Graduates with vocational degrees have continued to secure strong employment, according to the 2020 Graduate Outcomes Survey report released today.
The survey reports that: “COVID-19 has had a major impact on the Australian labour market, including graduate employment outcomes. As could be expected, graduate employment rates have declined between 2019 and 2020.”
Minister for Education Dan Tehan said the results served as further evidence the Government’s Job-ready Graduates package would help Australia’s COVID-19 recovery.
“The Job-ready Graduates package will provide more university places for Australian students, make it cheaper to study in areas of expected job growth and provide more funding and support to regional students and universities,” Mr Tehan said.
“It encourages students to choose a degree in areas of national priority including teaching, nursing and STEM, which will deliver them better employment outcomes and assist our economic recovery from the pandemic.
“In this year’s budget, our Government provided $550 million for additional university places and short courses to give more Australians the opportunity to improve their job prospects through education. When combined with the Job-ready Graduates package, there will be up to 30,000 additional university places for Australians next year. We introduced these reforms because students are facing an unprecedented economic challenge caused by COVID-19.”
The Graduate Outcomes Survey found pharmacy graduates had full-time employment rates of 96.4 per cent, up 0.7 percentage points in 2020. Engineering also performed strongly with a fulltime employment rate of 83.0 per cent, remaining substantially above the national average for all graduates. As stated above, the undergraduate full-time employment rate fell from 72.2 per cent in 2019 to 68.7 per cent in 2020, due to COVID-19.
The 2020 Graduate Outcomes Survey, which shows the short-term employment outcomes of higher education graduates four months after completion of their studies, confirms findings from the ABS Labour Force Survey that service-based activities have been among the worst affected, with the undergraduate full-time employment rate falling sharply in Communications, down 7.3 percentage points to 52.8 per cent, and creative arts, down 7.1 percentage points to 45.8 per cent.
The 2020 Graduate Outcomes Survey report and visual analytics can be found at www.qilt.edu.au/qilt-surveys/graduate-employment.
