Which sector has the best employment, salaries and relevance?

An important, and often overlooked, part of choosing a college degree is what you can do after you graduate. Personally, I chose the broadest course because I didn’t know what I wanted to do and when I handed in my final assignments, I still didn’t know what I wanted to do. By chance, I ended up doing a course in digital marketing and thankfully ended up loving it.

The demand for certain jobs obviously differs year to year, but there are sectors that are booming at the moment and given our ‘Silicon Docks’ it would be remiss to not mention the computing and ICT sector. The Higher Education Authority recently released their annual ‘What do Graduates Do?’ based on the 2014 graduates. It’s not exactly a page turner at 88 pages long, but it has some really interesting information regarding salaries and employment rates.

The Findings

Interestingly, the leading sector, across both undergraduate and masters graduates, is Computer Science / ICT. Graduates with an honours bachelor degree in this area also had the highest proportion of graduate employment in Ireland at 66%. This isn’t too surprising as these skills touch nearly every sector from pharma to banking to SaaS businesses. They are also the highest earners, with 62% of graduates earning €29,000 or more - an unreal starting salary. In comparison, masters graduates had an employment level of 84%! 

In comparison, 25% of Arts and Humanities graduates reported earning less than €13,000. 33% of graduates were in employment in Ireland with 45% doing further studies or training.

Another point of note is relevance. The HEA asked graduates how relevant was their degree to their job, Computing and ICT had the second highest relevance, with 78% of respondents stating their qualification was relevant (Education and Agriculture & Veterinary was 1% higher). Only 23% of graduates from Arts & Humanities stated their degree was relevant to their job - the lowest score across the board and below the average of 54%.

So, what can we take from this?

At Griffith College our computing courses are created to have content designed to meet the growing needs of industry and are an ideal way to advance your career in computing on both a full-time and part-time basis.

I’m not dissing Arts & Humanities, as I myself am a humanities graduate, but it’s clear from the HEA report that graduates who study a defined course have a better employment rate in the professional world. If you’re deciding between two fields of study, reports like this are great to gather more information beyond what college you’ll be going to and what modules will be taught.