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Graduate Employment Survey
Table of Contents
Introduction #
The Graduate Employment Survey (GES) is an annual survey jointly conducted by the autonomous universities (AUs) in Singapore: National University of Singapore (NUS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore Management University (SMU), Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT), and Singapore University of Social Sciences (SUSS). The survey is administered by each university approximately six months after graduates complete their final examinations, with results published around February of the following year.
What the GES measures #
The survey captures several key metrics for each degree programme:
- Employment Rates — the proportion of graduates in the labour force who are employed. This includes overall employment (full-time, part-time, temporary, freelance) and full-time permanent employment specifically.
- Monthly Salaries — both basic and gross monthly salaries for full-time permanently employed graduates, reported as mean, median, 25th percentile, and 75th percentile.
How the data is structured #
Each university publishes its own detailed report, and a joint publication aggregates the results across all AUs. The data is broken down by degree programme and also grouped into broad course clusters (e.g., Business, Engineering, Information & Digital Technologies) for cross-university comparisons.
Important caveats #
- Courses with fewer than 10 graduates or fewer than 10 respondents in full-time permanent employment have their salary data withheld — these appear as 0 in the charts.
- The response rate varies by course and university. A higher response rate gives greater confidence that the results are representative.
- Medicine, Law, Architecture, and Pharmacy graduates follow different timelines (housemanship, pupillage, practical training) and may be surveyed in follow-up waves rather than the main survey.
In this article, we analyze the GES results across NUS, NTU, SMU, SUSS, and SIT. We examine overall employment rates, starting salaries, and identify trends across multiple survey years.
Here are the subsections of the blog post:
References #
Overall GES Across all courses #
The joint university GES publications are no longer hosted by MOE following their CMS migration. For the overall statistics and cross-university comparisons, see the Overall Statistics page. Individual university reports (2021 onwards) are available below.