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By Carol Lewis, editor, The Times’ Career section

Markets are all about buying and selling and the graduate jobs market is no different. Carol Lewis, editor, The Times’ Career section, talks us through The Times Top 100 Employers


Employers, who want to hire university leavers, need to make themselves desirable to graduates. Graduates, who want to be hired, need to make themselves desirable to employers. The ideal market for graduates is lots of employers who want to hire lots of bright university leavers. The best market situation for employers is lots of bright university leavers looking for jobs.
In the last 10 years the number of people graduating from university has increased by almost 100,000 and in 2006 there were about 260,000 graduates. For these 260,000 people there were estimated to be between 85,000 and 90,000 graduate level vacancies.
A quick bit of arithmetic shows that there is one job for every three graduates. Of course not everyone wants a graduate job – some will want to travel, study, volunteer or find employment in roles which aren’t strictly graduate jobs. Nonetheless getting a good graduate job at a top employer isn’t easy, with each vacancy currently attracting between 25 and 100 applications.
The good news is that graduate vacancies at The Times Top 100 Employers are set to increase by nine per cent this year – it is the third year that the number of new graduate positions has increased. Together the employers featured in this year’s top 100 are set to hire 16,480 graduates, compared to the 15,120 recruited last year.
The average number of graduate vacancies at top 100 employers is now 100 per organisation. One in six of the employers are planning to hire at least 250 new recruits and four of the top 100 employers anticipate employing at least 1,000 university leavers this year.
This is all good news, particularly for those with a head for figures – most of the vacancies are at accountancy firms (24.9 per cent of total graduate jobs) or investment banks (19.3 per cent of total). Don’t panic if you are an arts graduate though: almost all the big professional services firms and financial institutions say they want to recruit people from a broad range of degree backgrounds – they are not looking to hire ready-made accountants and bankers.
But if these sectors don’t appeal there are also plenty of graduate vacancies in the public sector and industry. The employers who intend to hire the fewest graduates are those in the chemical & pharmaceutical sector, consumer goods and oil & energy.
The biggest graduate recruiters in The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers in 2007 are: PricewaterhouseCoopers and Deloitte (1,200 vacancies each), the Army and Deutsche Bank (1,000 vacancies each), KPMG (850 vacancies), Ernst & Young (650 vacancies), Bloomberg (600 vacancies), Accenture, Barclays Capital, HSBC & JP Morgan (400 vacancies each).
Obviously everyone wants an interesting and satisfying career but the fiscal reality is that salaries do matter as the average student leaves university £10,000 in debt. Luckily the UK’s leading graduate employers are boosting starting salaries by 7.8 per cent in 2007, taking average packages to £26,400 – a £1,900 increase on last year’s average graduate starting salary.
The highest starting salary published by this year's Top 100 employers is £38,000 plus an Audi A4 car which is being offered by retailer Aldi. More than a fifth of the top graduate programmes will now pay graduates at least £30,000 when they start work later this year. The most generous salaries tend to be those on offer from investment banks (an average of £35,000), law firms (an average of £30,000), and consulting firms (an average of £28,500), although these rates are largely unchanged since 2006.
At the other end of the scale eight organisations plan to pay initial salaries of just £20,000 to graduates. Despite the problem of rising student debt though these organisations are well worth considering. There is much more to life than money – graduates really need to consider what motivates them, what career development and training opportunities are available, the work-life balance they want and their long-term career strategies.
Graduates not only need to gain a good degree but also pick up crucial soft skills along the way. Employers crave well-rounded individuals with demonstrable competencies such as communication skills, motivation and organization, the ability to work in teams and leadership potential.
But for those finalists who do make the grade there are rewarding careers and good salaries on offer at The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers.

This is an abridged version of an article in The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers 2006-2007 handbook by Carol Lewis, editor of Career. Career is published every Thursday in The Times. www.timesonline.co.uk/career

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What is the Top 100?
The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers is compiled by the independent market research company, High Fliers Research Ltd. High Fliers interviewed 16,452 final year students who left UK universities in the summer of 2006.
This Top 100 is a dynamic league table of the UK’s most exciting and well-respected graduate recruiters in 2006. For the third year running, the professional services firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers has been named Britain’s number one graduate employer, polling more than 10 per cent of the total student vote.
For the first time since the Top 100 was launched in 1997, the top three places in the employers league table are taken by ‘Big Four’ professional services firms.

Free information request service
If you would like to find out more about any of the employers featured in The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers, then simply register your details and the employers you are interested in at www.Top100GraduateEmployers.com. You’ll receive email bulletins about the employers, details of their presentations and careers events at your university, and other information about their graduate recruitment.

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