18th May 2000

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Over half of Northern Ireland’s graduates feel that their skills and talents are underused in Northern Ireland business and industry, and that local employers do not provide mechanisms to develop and enhance graduates’ skills. In addition, female graduates still tend to earn less than their male counterparts.

Those are just some of the disturbing findings from a major study which surveyed over 1400 Northern Ireland graduates, four years after graduation.

Other findings from the study, carried out by the University of Ulster’s Professor Bob Osborne reveal that:

· A substantial majority of graduates were successful in obtaining full-time employment.

· Graduates are satisfied or highly satisfied with the skills they have acquired in higher education. This applies to those who undertook their studies in Northern Ireland and elsewhere.

· A substantial majority of graduates, however, record a low level of utilisation of these skills and a failure of most of their employers to provide mechanisms for the development or enhancement of those skills.

· Follow-up detailed telephone interviews with thirty graduates living in Northern Ireland and elsewhere confirmed that few employers have a training policy and that the identification of training needs and their implementation are largely left up to individual employers.

· Three-quarters of these graduates were employed in SMEs. These employers are more likely not to utilise graduate skills and not to have training policies.

· Employers in Northern Ireland are less likely to utilise the skills of their graduates than employers elsewhere in the UK. This is linked to the higher numbers of SMEs in Northern Ireland.

Other key findings of the survey are:

· Female graduates are consistently less well treated financially in the labour market than comparable male graduates. When females are compared with males with the same level of qualification, discipline and occupation, female salaries are significantly lower. It is also noticeable these differences are evident before these graduates have started to have children.

· Patterns of student and graduate migration largely follow previous evidence: Protestants are twice as likely to migrate to study outside Northern Ireland as Catholics; most of those who leave do not return (67%). Two new trends in this survey are:

- slightly higher return of Protestant graduates to Northern Ireland after study in Britain; and,

- a small but noticeable flow of Catholic male graduates to the Republic of Ireland including those who initially studied in Northern Ireland and those who studied in Britain.

While many employers often complain that the graduates they recruit do not always have the skills they require, this evidence suggests that there is another side to the picture.

Report author Professor Bob Osborne said: "There is clearly a need for the Training and Employment Agency together with the Sectoral Training Councils to assist organizations in identifying relevant training policies which will allow for the better use of their graduate employees’ skills and their enhancement.

"Employers that fail to do this will increasingly fail to retain graduate employees, as ‘company loyalty’ is largely a thing of the past."

For further information, please contact:

Press Office Department of Communication and Development
Telephone: 028 9036 6178
Email: pressoffice@ulster.ac.uk