Full-time employment rate rises for recent grads

Employment numbers rose by 6.2 percent for alumni of Penn’s most recent graduating class, compared to the Class of 2013.

Preliminary results from the Career Plans Survey Report, released annually by Career Services, revealed that around 73 percent of graduates obtained full-time employment, an increase from 66.8 percent full-time employed 2013 graduates .

Director of Career Services Patricia Rose explained that the increase in full-time employment rates for graduates is because of a “stronger economy.” According to Rose, full-time employment has consistently risen since the Class of 2010 .

“It’s a good time to be graduating from Penn,” Rose said. “There are many studies out there that show how many recent college graduates are not able to find jobs. But that’s not true at Penn. Our students are sought after by employers across a wide range of fields.”

Like in previous years, financial services and consulting continued to be the most popular industry choices among graduates, with 25 and 16 percent, respectively, going into the two fields .

Wharton and Engineering sophomore Sangmin Oh , who returned after serving two years in the South Korean military, said he found the full-time employment rate to be “generally high.”

“But I’m not surprised it’s high, since it’s Penn,” Oh said. “Given the level of professionalism we tend to display and the general career-oriented atmosphere, I’m not surprised at all.”

Forty-eight percent of full-time employment respondents found their jobs through Career Services . Of these Career Services users, just more than half found their jobs through on-campus recruiting .

For Engineering junior Aravind Rao , who plans to work full-time upon graduation, on-campus recruiting “is not something that has benefits as opposed to searching online.”

“I feel like a lot of the tech companies that I apply to have search engines that are so good that there’s no real advantage in doing OCR,” he explained. “But for financial firms, OCR definitely helps because a lot of them are selective about who they take resumes from.”

More than 80 percent of the Class of 2014 had responded to the survey by Oct. 23 , but it does not officially close until November when the full report will be issued, according to Director of Career Services Patricia Rose. In addition to the undergraduate career plans survey, surveys for each of the undergraduate schools will be completed in December .

Rose estimates that by the completion of the survey, there will be an 83 percent survey yield rate.

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