Society;|;DOI: 10.1145/1839676.1839684
Leah;Hoffmann
career opportunities
What are the job prospects for today’s—and tomorrow’s—graduates?

LaST FaLL, JIM Wordelman found himself in an enviable po- sition. At a time when un- employment for recent U.S. college graduates was at the highest level since 1983, Wordelman, a senior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s (UIUC’s) Department of Computer Science, had several job offers from companies that wanted to hire him the following summer. Eventually, he took a job with Microsoft as a developer on its Internet Explorer team. “I did work for the company before and loved it,” Wordelman explains. The job also put him in a position to follow his greatest passion: accessibility.

If recent data is any indication,
Wordelman’s case is not unique among
computer science graduates in the U.S.
(the job prospects for graduates in the
United Kingdom, China, and India are
discussed later ). In fact, his fellow UIUC
CS graduates received an average of 2. 4
job offers this year. The mean starting
salary: $68,650. “Our undergrads have
had no trouble getting positions,” says
Rob Rutenbar, the department head.
“Most of them are doing things like soft-
ware development. Some launch entre-
preneurial ventures.”
At Carnegie Mellon University
(CMU), the job outlook is equally rosy:
95% of this year’s CS students had jobs
waiting for them upon graduation.
“Companies may be a little choosier,
but they are still hiring,” says Susanne
Hambrusch, a computer science profes-
sor at Purdue University, where gradu-
ates enjoyed mean starting salaries of
$66,875 last year.

pHotograpH By DanIeL m Iyamoto

According to projections from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), computing will be one of the fastest-growing job markets through 2018. Employment of software engineers, computer scientists, and network, database, and systems administrators is expected to grow between 24%–32% through 2018. They account for 71% of new jobs among the STEM (science,

computer science graduates at carnegie mellon university, shown above, and other schools often have jobs waiting for them upon graduation.

 

technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields. For a discipline that is still struggling with the public perception that its jobs are migrating offshore, such career predictions offer an important counterpoint.

Of the new jobs, according to BLS projections, 27% will be in software engineering, 21% in computing networking, and 10% in systems analysis. Software engineering alone is expected to add nearly 300,000 jobs in the next eight years.

Computer programmers will fare
less well, with a projected decline in
employment of 3% through 2018. The
BLS cites advances in programming
tools, as well as offshore outsourcing,
as contributing factors to this decline.
Nonetheless, the federal agency pre-
dicts employers will continue to need
some local programmers, especially
ones with strong technical skills. And
many companies, having discovered
that outsourcing is more challenging to
manage than anticipated, are turning to
domestic outsourcing to complete their
programming projects, which is a trend
the BLS expects to continue.

the coolness factor

According to a recent study conducted
by the National Association of Colleges
and Employers, the average salary for
this year’s crop of computer science
grads stands at $61, 112. And while it’s
too early to say for sure, some industry
watchers predict an influx of students
who might otherwise have majored
in finance. Harsha, for example, cites
David E. Shaw, a computer scientist
turned hedge fund manager who made
a fortune in quantitative trading, then
returned to scientific research: “He’s a
model for a certain group.”
There is also a coolness factor among
a generation of students who grew up
with computers and are deeply engaged
with technologies like cellphones, Face-
book and other social media, and the
latest electronic devices from Apple and