Image: @Youxventures/Unsplash
A new report exploring the career destinations of graduates highlights the increasingly vital need for geographers in the graduate job market.
The annual report, What do graduates do?, published by Prospects Luminate, says: ‘Companies in the UK increasingly need ethical hackers, atmospheric scientists, virtual world creators, artificial intelligence trainers, sustainability experts, climatologists and many more. There is therefore a vital role to play for graduates from biological sciences, chemistry, physics, physical and geographical sciences and sports science’.
It also found that just over half (51.7%) of graduates from social science disciplines were in full-time employment, of which geography had the highest proportion (58.9%). In addition, it indicates that a much higher percentage of geographers enter professional-level jobs after graduation (74.8%), relative to the average for the social sciences (60.8%).
The report, as in previous years, highlights the diversity of roles and sectors in which graduate geographers can be found, with education, marketing, and engineering among popular destinations. It also indicates that a considerable proportion of physical and geographical science graduates ‘embraced opportunities in business and finance (nearly 18%) where the salaries are highly competitive and organisations are very proactive in trying to recruit technical graduates with a flair for maths and highly developed analytical skills’.
Based on data tracing the destinations of the graduating cohort of 2017/18, this is the first annual What do graduates do? report to use graduate destination data collected 15 months after graduation, rather than the six-month timeframe used previously. While acknowledging the unprecedented disruption to the jobs market caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the report highlights that the graduate labour market has been the least affected part of the economy, with some exceptions.
Find out more about choosing geography.