- - The Graduate Market in 2013 is a study of the latest graduate vacancies and starting salaries at one hundred of the UK’s best-known and most successful employers, conducted by High Fliers Research during December 2012: • Despite optimistic initial targets for the 2011-2012 recruitment season, the UK’s leading employers recruited fewer graduates than expected in 2012 – entry-level vacancies decreased by 0.8% compared with recruitment in 2011. Employers had increased their graduate recruitment by 2.8% in 2011 and 12.6% in 2010, following sharp falls of 17.8% in 2009 and 6.7% in 2008. • The biggest cuts in vacancies in 2012 were at the accounting & professional services firms and the investment banks – employers in these sectors reduced their graduate intake by more than 1,200 places, compared with their original recruitment targets. • The outlook for the current recruitment season has improved and employers are expecting to increase their graduate recruitment by 2.7% in 2013. • Almost half of employers expect to recruit additional graduates in 2013 and a further third plan to maintain their intake at 2012 levels – employers in eleven out of thirteen key industries and employment areas are expecting to take on more new graduates than in 2012. • The biggest growth in vacancies is expected at public sector employers, retailers and engineering & industrial companies – graduate recruitment has increased significantly in all three sectors over the last three years. • Whilst the total number of graduate vacancies is set to increase in 2013, recruiters expect that over a third of this year’s entry-level positions will be filled by graduates who have already worked for their organisations – either through internships, industrial placements or vacation work – and therefore are not open to other students from the ‘Class of 2013’. • Three quarters of the graduate vacancies advertised this year by City investment banks and half the training contracts offered by the leading law firms are likely to be filled by graduates who have already completed work experience with the employer. • The largest recruiters of graduates in 2013 will be Teach First (1260 vacancies), Deloitte (1,200 vacancies) and PwC (1,200 vacancies). • Benchmarking graduate vacancies in 2013 with those available six years ago shows that recruitment is still well below pre-recession levels – across all the organisations featured within the research, the number of vacancies on offer this year remains more than 10% lower than in 2007. Executive Summary The Graduate Market in 2013 • Starting salaries for 2013 at the UK’s leading graduate employers are expected to remain unchanged for an unprecedented fourth year – at a median of £29,000. Graduate salaries increased by 7.4% in 2010 and 5.9% in 2009. • A fifth of top graduate programmes will pay new recruits more than £35,000 when they start work and eight organisations are offering at least £40,000 to this year’s graduates. • The most generous salaries are those on offer from investment banks (median of £45,000), law firms (median of £38,000) and oil & energy companies (median of £32,500). • Public sector employers (median of £22,200) have the lowest graduate pay rates for 2013. • Fewer than one in seven employers have increased their graduate recruitment budgets for the 2012-2013 recruitment round but more than a quarter of organisations have reduced their spending on graduate recruitment this year. • On average, the country’s leading employers have been actively marketing their 2013 graduate vacancies at twenty UK universities, using a variety of university careers fairs, campus recruitment presentations and online advertising. • The ten universities most-often targeted by Britain’s top graduate employers in 2012- 2013 are Warwick, Nottingham, Manchester, Cambridge, Bristol, Durham, Oxford, Birmingham, Bath and Leeds. • Over a third of employers said they had received more completed graduate job applications during the early part of the recruitment season than they had last year but almost a quarter of organisations reported that they’d had fewer applicants. • Together, the UK’s top employers have received 7% more graduate job applications so far, compared with the equivalent period in the 2011-2012 recruitment round. • More than four-fifths of the UK’s leading graduate employers are offering paid work experience programmes for students and recent graduates during the 2012-2013 academic year – a record 11,387 places are available. • At least half of employers are providing industrial placements for undergraduates (typically for 6-12 months) and half have paid vacation internships lasting more than three weeks. • Over half the recruiters who took part in the research warn that graduates who have had no previous work experience at all are unlikely to be successful during the selection process and have little or no chance of receiving a job offer for their organisations’ graduate programmes . . ! !
Posted on: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 14:34:47 +0000
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