More graduates remained unemployed 6 months after leaving school in 2022, but median salaries up: Survey

SINGAPORE — More graduates remained unemployed six months after leaving school, though median salaries went up last year, especially for technology-related jobs, a survey found.

Of the 10,700 fresh graduates in the labour force polled in the 2022 Joint Autonomous Universities Graduate Employment Survey, 93.8 per cent were employed within six months of completing their final examinations — down from 94.4 per cent in 2021.

This is the first such drop since 2017, when the proportion of fresh graduates who were employed within six months of finishing their exams dropped by a similar margin of 0.6 percentage points from 89.5 per cent to 88.9 per cent.

Among those who found employment in 2022, 87.5 per cent secured a full-time job, up from 84 per cent in 2021. The proportion of those who were freelancing increased slightly to 1.8 per cent from 1.7 per cent in 2021.

The proportion of graduates in part-time or temporary employment fell to 4.5 per cent from 8.7 per cent in 2021.

The survey — conducted by the National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Management University and Singapore University of Social Sciences — also found that the median gross monthly salary among fresh graduates in full-time permanent employment rose to S$4,200, from S$3,800 in 2021.

The increase was the most significant in the information and digital technologies course cluster, which saw the median gross monthly salary of those in full-time jobs increase from S$5,000 in 2021 to S$5,625 in 2022.

This cluster, along with health sciences and engineering clusters, recorded the highest percentage of full-time permanent employment.

The remaining clusters also saw increases in median gross monthly salary, though the salaries for the arts, design and media clusters held steady.

A follow-up survey polled close to 800 graduates in courses that typically require post-graduate practical training before the graduates can practise in their professions. It found that fewer graduates were employed after the completion of their practical training in 2022 than in 2021.

The proportion in 2022 was 97.4 per cent, down from 98.1 per cent in 2021.

Of these, 94.9 per cent secured a full-time job, down from 96 per cent in 2021. Another 0.8 per cent were freelancing, compared to 0.3 per cent in 2021.

The median gross monthly salary of those in full-time permanent employment went up to S$5,500 in 2022, compared to S$5,000 in 2021.

Surveys done by the Singapore Institute of Technology and Singapore University of Technology and Design are ongoing and the results will be released at a later date.