graduate unemployment in china and australia
Graduate unemployment in China
Thursday, 5 February 2009
China’s surge of college graduates finds white-collar work elusive. Some 6.1 million grads are expected to flood the job market this year – joining the 27 percent of last year’s diploma-holders who still haven’t found work. Instead, they’re finding deserted job fairs, hiring freezes, and salaries that migrant workers might expect. Confronted by global recession and a heavily blue-collar economy, China’s educated elite are having to lower their expectations – frustrating families and putting the government on alert ahead of the 20th anniversary of the student-led Tiananmen protests.
There’s “a mismatch between expectations and realities, exacerbated by the current economic slowdown,” says Thomas Rawski, a China expert at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. “It really is a clash of preferences.” The oversupply of students first ballooned in 1999, when China erected a flurry of colleges in an effort to mint more of the scientists and managers it needed for a 21st-century economy. It also sought to absorb a burst of teenagers born in a post-Cultural Revolution baby boom after 1976.
Enrollment rose quickly, from 3 percent of college-age students in the 1980s to 20 percent today. Despite the rapid expansion, only 6 percent of the population now holds college degrees. Not surprisingly, graduates expect elite jobs, as do the relatives who footed their tuition bill. Topping the A-list are government jobs, which pay modestly but offer benefits and security. Last year, some 750,000 students took the civil service exam – and only 2 percent could expect slots. Big companies draw students, too: Though less stable than the civil service, business jobs pay well and provide better training.
AUSTRALIA: Graduates prepare for job shortages
Geoff Maslen
01 March 2009
As the economic downturn begins increasingly to affect Australian industry and business, university graduates are preparing for a far more difficult time finding jobs than any generation in more than 20 years. Surveys by Graduate Careers Australia show that as employment opportunities decline, many graduates opt to continue their full-time studies. Their idea seems to be to improve their qualifications so they might stand out from the increasing number of bachelor degree-holders leaving the higher education system.
In a survey released last month, the GCA says that some graduates find themselves in areas of employment they might not have previously considered and these might be stop-gap jobs until the labour market improves. “In the interim, these graduates are earning and developing important work-related skills,” the GCA says. At the same time, some graduates take longer to find appropriate work than they might have in previous years - although Australian Bureau of Statistics data show that graduates aged 15 to 64 in the workforce have an unemployment rate half that of non-graduates.
Graduate salaries, however, relative to average earnings in the community tend to fall as graduates take non-graduate level work and thus earn lower salaries. In a survey of graduate employers late last year on the likely impact of the financial downturn on their hiring prospects, almost three in five said it would have some impact. Although nearly three-quarters of employers said they would definitely not cancel taking on new graduates, 9% said they would definitely cut the number and almost 70% said they would consider reducing their 2010 intake of 2009 graduates.
GCA Executive Director Cindy Tilbrook said that despite the economic downturn, it was still important for graduate recruiters to consider the longer term and not just the short-term when reviewing their graduate programmes. “Some of the underlying factors that have driven the recent boom in graduate recruitment in Australia are still relevant, such as the overall ageing of the workforce, and graduate recruiters can use the current situation to place themselves in a preferential position in the eyes of graduates through a commitment to their graduate programmes in these difficult times,” Tilbrook said. She said a continued intake of graduates would also ensure these recruiters were well-placed to maximise opportunities as soon as the economic climate started to turn.
The GCA also surveyed current university students to discover whether students’ career expectations were in line with those of graduate employers. The top selection criteria used for recruiting graduates were interpersonal and communication skills, passion, a knowledge of the industry, drive and commitment, and critical reasoning and analytical skills, problem solving ability, lateral thinking and technical skills. Asked to rank their 2008 graduate applicants on a variety of characteristics, the top three listed by employers were academic results, communication skills, and level of extra-curricular activities. Recruiters rated applicants lowest on their knowledge of the recruiter’s organisation and their demonstrated work experience.
Employers of graduates often expressed a desire for “well-rounded applicants who had a range of core job-ready employability skills, as well as those with outstanding academic achievements. Of their own core employability skills, more than three-quarters of students rated their learning and teamwork skills as being “fairly strong” or “very strong” with around three-quarters rating their communication and problem solving skills relatively highly.”
Graduate Careers Australia Grad stats
http://www.graduatecareers.com.au/content/view/full/24
University of Melbourne Graduate Destination Survey (GDS)
http://www.upo.unimelb.edu.au/Public/Qual_Eval/EC_GDS.html
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