It’s become apparent that if you want a decent-paying job in South Africa, you need to have a tertiary qualification.

The type of tertiary qualification you get can clearly influence the type of job that you get, and your level of qualification could affect your salary. If you look at South African jobs paying the highest salaries, for example, you’ll notice that there are very few positions that would require a humanities degree.

As BusinessTech points out, “while the country’s unemployment rates sit at their highest levels in decades, there is a clear distinction between the unemployment rates across various education levels”.

The latest report shows that, of the 6.1 million unemployed persons in Q4 2018, approximately 57.1% had an education level below matric, followed by those with a matric at 34.2%.

By comparison, only 1.7% of the unemployed persons were graduates, while 6.3% had some form of tertiary qualification as their highest level of education.

The graph below shows how the unemployment rate by education status has shifted and changed in the last seven years:

Between 83% and 97% of graduates from top SA universities go on to find employment after they graduate, with the exception being UKZN, where the rate is much lower:

• University of the Witwatersrand – 97%
• Nelson Mandela University – 95%
• North-West University – 87%
• University of Pretoria – 85%
• University of Johannesburg – 83%
• University of Cape Town (incl. post-grad) – 80%
• University of KwaZulu Natal – 33%

Having a job, however, does not guarantee a high salary. The type of degree that you hold effects the type of employment that you can obtain, and consequently your salary.

According to salary data from wage tracking group, PayScale, this is also reflected in the average salary data across degree types – showing that people with engineering degrees are paid higher than other degree types.

PayScale’s data is based on user-inputted information, updated to February 2019.

…PayScale’s system allows for specific degrees to be indicated – but in the table below we’ve used the general degree categories. For example, the general BCom category shows an average salary of R327,000 a year, but those who studied a BCom Accounting show an average of R354,000.

The table below shows the average salary as well as the minimum and maximum salary possible per degree:

Payscale also looked at the average salary of university alumni at some of SA’s top universities:

The really weird thing here is that the top earners (UKZN) also come from the university with the lowest post-graduation employment rate. Only 33% of their graduate get jobs, but they sure are paid well.

Rhodes University and the University of the Free State, on the other hand, didn’t feature in the report, which is odd.

I would be interested to see how they tip the scales.

[source:businesstech]