Career placements for IT graduates has finally recovered
from the dot-com burst and looks set overtake the national average across all
sectors for graduate job placements.

In 2003 career placements for Australian IT graduates searching for full-time
work was at its lowest ebb; 68.1 percent compared to a national average across
all sectors of 80.1 percent.

Since then IT graduate placements have climbed to 83 percent for 2007, and
are expected to continue to rise as the demand for skilled IT workers grows,
according to the not-for-profit research and careers education body Graduate
Careers Australia (GCA).

"There were fairly low employment prospects for IT graduates, as there
was for the entire IT sector which was fairly poor for five or six years,"
said Bruce Guthrie, research manager for GCA.

According to Guthrie, IT graduates are just now coming back to a position where
their employment figures reflect the figures of graduates across all job sectors.

"For example, last year in our latest destination survey which takes place
about four months after people have finished their degrees, 83 percent of IT
graduates who wanted a full time job were in full time employment."

Those figures are still slightly off the pace of the GCA's national average
for all graduates of 84.5 percent, but are expected to continue to rise.

"They were hugely behind the national average. It has gone from 70.5 percent
in 2004, to 73.7 percent in 2005, 78.8 percent in 2006 to 83 percent last year.
So it's going in the right direction," Guthrie said.

"I would expect it to continue and certainly the projections from the
Department of Employment and Workplace Relations, as they were before the election,
also indicated a continued recovery in the demand for IT graduates and IT employers
in general."

Guthrie explained that it was important to note that these figures do not represent
the situation of IT workers in general.

"What you need to keep in mind with these figures is that they are new
graduates with varying amounts of experience, and in many cases little, if any,
experience. So it can take them a little longer to find work than somebody who
has been in the labor market for a couple of years," he said.

While experienced IT workers are always in high demand, the figures demonstrate
that the market for new IT graduates in general has not kept pace with graduate
levels across all job sectors.

"Just to give you a further flavor, in the year 2000 the employment figures
for computer science graduates was 88.2 percent when employment figures for
all graduates was 83.6 percent. So there they were over four percentage points
ahead of

• Email
• Print
• Share
  • Slashdot
  • Digg
  • Stumble
  • Reddit
  • Newsvine