University graduates need to look at moving out of the city if they want to find a job, with up to 46 grads competing for one job.
Raife Watson, the CEO of Adzuna – a job search engine – told Lifestyle Overnight there were ‘a lot of jobs out there, but not a lot of jobs for graduates’.
Mr Watson said Sydney was a great place for a graduate to find a job, as a lot of companies started up in the capital city, and a lot of infrastructure projects underway.
But for the best chances of finding a graduate job, Mr Watson said the Northern Territory was the place to go.
Graduates are facing stiff competition for jobs, with one graduate position advertised for every 46 university graduates in South Australia
South Australia was the worst place to find a graduate position according to the company’s research, with 46 graduates competing for each job on average.
NSW has odds of 20 to one, but the Northern Territory has only an average of ten people applying for each job.
Mr Watson said that unsurprisingly, the top end often struggled to attract graduates, meaning the jobs were more plentiful.
‘Go somewhere where your skills are really needed for a couple of years and develop those skills,’ he advised new graduates.
Nationally, the average was 22 new graduates for each relevant position.
Mr Watson said universities had ‘a lot to answer for’ in terms of course admission far outweighing job availability.
‘Universities are now profit making machines, and a lot of them are offering huge amounts of students these courses that there are no jobs for,’ he said.
‘You come out of uni with a $40,000 debt and no hope of finding a job in your chosen profession.’
Raife Watson (pictured), the CEO of job search engine Adzuna, says the Northern Territory is the best place for new grads to look for a position, with only 10 people competing for each graduate position
Mr Watson told the Sydney Morning Herald new graduates were now often taking up jobs completely unrelated to their expensive qualifications in order to pay the bills.
‘You end up behind a bar, or in some other job that’s unrelated to what you studied. You see a lot of law graduates going into sales or call centres,’ he said.
And while Adzuna’s research showed there were about 90 law graduates for every graduate law position, there were only nine graduates with engineering degrees for each related position.
Mr Watson said there needed to be a bigger push from the government to ensure fields that need skilled workers have enough people, and students aren’t left out of pocket and out of a job.
‘We need to think about what’s really needed in education, the courses that we really need in the country,’ he said.
‘Why aren’t we pushing more people into STEM [science, technology, engineering and maths] degrees?’