Employment rate of graduates rise to 75.6 pct in 2023: Official data

ANKARA

The employment rate among graduates increased from 75.1 percent in 2022 to 75.6 percent last year, data from the Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK) have shown.

According to TÜİK’s data on the figures of the country’s higher education employment rates in 2023, the registered employment rate of associate degree holders saw a similar rise, increasing from 67.3 percent in 2022 to 67.7 percent last year.

The departments of special education teaching, medicine, language and speech therapy, electrical teaching and midwifery had the greatest rates of registered employment at the bachelor's degree level in 2023, the data showed. Accordingly, health and welfare had the highest bachelor's degree employment rate, 87.4 percent, among all fields.

Police vocational education had the highest percentage of registered employment at the associate degree level (92.1 percent), followed by electrical energy production, transmission, and distribution, industrial molding, metallurgy, hunting and wildlife and welding technology.

Engineering, manufacturing and construction emerged as the field with the highest reported employment rate for associate degree holders in 2023, standing at 77.3 percent. It was followed by the natural sciences, mathematics and statistics, services, information and communication technologies, agriculture and forestry, fisheries and veterinary medicine.

Pilotage, mathematical engineering, aircraft engineering, control and automation engineering and marine machinery management engineering were the five departments with the highest average monthly salaries for bachelor’s degree holders in 2023. Meanwhile, store management and retail sales was the associate degree department with the highest average salary, according to TÜİK’s data.

The data also covered the length of time it takes for bachelor’s and associate degree holders to secure employment.

In 2022, it took bachelor's degree holders an average of 15 months to get their first employment, while in 2023, this time frame shrank to 14.4 months.

According to data, it took an average of 15.9 months in 2023 for associate degree holders to land their first employment while this rate was 16.8 months in 2022.