Postgraduate Destinations: Employment Characteristics of Australia's Postgraduate Completers (Careers FORUM‪)‬

Postgraduate Destinations is an annual report produced by Graduate Careers Australia (GCA), concerning the work and study outcomes of recent graduates from postgraduate level courses offered at Australian higher education institutions. The report is based on the results of the Australian Graduate Survey (AGS), the nation's largest survey of higher education graduates, and complements other annual GCA reports such as Graduate Destinations, Graduate Salaries, Graduate Course Experience and Postgraduate Research Experience. Postgraduate Destinations 2006 (published in September 2007) was based on over 28 500 responses from postgraduates, including those with graduate and postgraduate certificates and diplomas, coursework masters degrees, research masters degrees, professional doctorates and PhDs. This article looks at some of the findings of the 2006 report. Prospects for postgraduates continued to improve in 2006 with the median annual salary for a new postgraduate climbing to $60,000, up by $1,900 from 2005. This was $18,000 more than the median salary of bachelor degree graduates in 2006 ($42,000). (Note that the bachelor degree cohort this figure is based on differs from that used in GCA's Graduate Salaries 2006 report, as the latter restricts analysis to those in their first full-time employment and under 25 years of age.)