Australian Graduate Advice and Resource Centre

Welcome to GradCareers.com.au, a site started by GradConnection and centred around advice and resources to help Australian students into their first graduate job. We plan to build and develop this resource for graduates over the coming weeks and months, to have a full set of advice articles on every stage of the graduate recruitment process.

To start off, we will be developing a set of articles around graduate applications, graduate assessment, interviews right through to your first days in your new graduate career and how to develop professionally.

• Graduate Advice and Information Section
• Graduate Advice Wiki (new!)

This site is intended for Australian graduates, however we welcome international graduates to use this site and we would like to hear if we have helped you. Bear in mind that all the content is taylored to how student and graduate recrutiment works in Australia and may not be entirely relevant to your situation.

The Australian Graduate Market

The Australian graduate recruitment market is traditionally an employers market, where successful graduates will apply for between 6 and 10 graduate programs. The accounting industry produces the most qualified graduates of any industry, and has the most vacancies available of any industry. This is followed closely by Business and Commerce, Engineering and Information Technology.

The main season for graduate recruitment in Australia is between March and April, when the majority of large graduate employers are open for graduate applications. If you apply for a graduate program during this time you will most likely be starting your graduate career within the early stages of the following year.

There are around 300 major graduate employers in Australia, with countless other employers that take graduates onboard on a needs basis.

Types of Graduate Employers and Programs

There are several types of graduate employers out there.

• Large - will take on hundreds of graduates per year in a large range of different diciplines, usually on a national basis
• Medium - will take on around 20 to 30 graduates a year, usually reserved to one or two different diciplines
• Small - will hire under five graduates per year, usually only in one industry sector
• Irregular - open to hiring graduates but not usually on an annual basis

There are really two differnt types of graduate programs availabe

• Rotational - where a graduate will rotate through several different business units or areas, for a few months at a time. At the end of a rotational graduate program, a graduate will be able to choose which area of the business they want a job in.
• Specialist - you are hired straight from university to complete a specialist graduate role. You hit the ground running from the word go, but are still belong to a graduate team and have a graduate manager.
• BAU - Business as usual. You are hired is a graduate, but you are not part of a graduate team, your responsibilities lie with your direct manager.