Among workplace rookies, more NTUST's graduates are employed

By Chang Ching-Wen, Business Weekly

    Business Weekly conducted a survey of rookies' employment rates among new college graduates with 104 Corporation, the leading job bank in Taiwan. The survey sampled job-seekers who just earned their bachelor degrees from colleges. The survey covered three years from 2008 to 2010. The new workers are considered "actually recently employed" when they were hired within six month of graduation.

    The report based on the survey has traced 21 workplace freshmen from each of the 147 colleges or universities in Taiwan. The sampling rates of higher than 10% are proportional to actual numbers of graduates from the graduates' database of each school. According to Kuo Chia-Wei of the Dept. of Industrial & Operations Engineering, NTU, such a sampling is pretty close to the real cases.

    The survey results surprised many education experts. They were shocked to see some unforeseen numbers. For example, NTUST's new graduates should have similar employment rates to those of National Taiwan University, whose students are known to be among 1 % elite high-school students in Taiwan.

There are four trends found in this survey that are "shocking".

1. Traditional brand-name universities are missing from the leading group.

    According to the "actual employment rates" defined in this survey, the schools that have top 25% numbers form the leading group. Some name schools are still in the leading group, such as NTU, Chengchi University and NTCU; whereas other prestige schools such as NCKU and NTHU no longer enjoy high employment rates. From a cross reference to a survey on school names favored by human resources managers, which was also conducted last year by Business Weekly in corporation with 104 Corporation, some of the top-ten favorite schools, such as NCKU, NTHU, Tamkang University, Fu Jen University and NSYU, are surprisingly not in the leading group. This indicates that freshmen from favored schools no longer have the advantage of being hired. A possible explanation is that the "good impression" still holds true among top management, but common employees or mid-level manages are having their own thinking.

2. Among the leading group, over half of them are technological & vocational schools.

    In the past, there were spotted news reports on some special graduates from technological & vocational schools were welcome because of their special skills. It's a total different story in this survey. 54% of schools in the leading group are technological & vocational schools. In addition to NTUST's performance of 70.44% overtakes that of NTU (69.07%), CGUST (74.81%), Yun Tech (71.92%) and NKUHT (71.73%) all have great performance.

    This trend might have an impact on how high school students decide on which school and which department to choose. From the contrast between NTUST's graduates and those from NTU, more NTUST products found their first jobs than graduates from NTU and NTUST's graduated rookies' starting salaries are only 3000 NTD lower than those received by NTU graduates. Over half of the newly-hired by Pegatron, an important Apple supplier, are from NTUST.

3. The second-tier schools whose students are mostly low achievement high-school students are relatively welcome in the job market.

    Some schools of the leading group, such as Tainan U. of the Arts, Taiwan Sport University and Taiwan Hospitality and Tourism University, are the first timers. It's a new trend that departments of hospitality and tourism are welcome, only next to departments of medical and nursing. Take THTU for example, even five-star hotels such as the Regent Hotel and the Grand Hotel went to Hualien to recruit their new employees from THTU. Some of the famous hospitality employers from Japan and Singapore are interested in working with THTU for their employee training. According to President Chang Ruay-Shiung of THTU, a lot of their students have more than one offerings upon graduation.

    Graduates from Department of Food Science and Technology, NTU are most welcome in the job market because of their training in both food inspection and bakery & cooking. Their graduates enjoy 100% of employment. A lot of their graduates turn out to be employees of 85°C Bakery Café, Wowprime, Bakery 49, Rivon, etc.

4. Graduates of some "springboard" departments are no longer the temporary starting post.

    Surprisingly, graduates from the departments of Korean Language & Culture and of Turkish Language & Culture at NCCU, and Departement de Francais at NCU have employment rates of high performance. Korean department graduates are almost 100% employed. In the past, many of their students treat the departments as springboard to launch onto "better" departments. Now the case is no longer true. With so many big Korean companies are expanding globally, their subsidiaries in Taiwan need graduates of Korean major. Those hired by the Korean companies even enjoy much higher salaries than graduates from other departments.