New graduates faced lower average starting salaries this year, online recruitment company 104 Job Bank (104 人力銀行) said yesterday.
“In fact, the higher the education, the larger the drop in pay,” Monica Chiu (邱文仁), marketing director at 104 Job Bank told a press briefing.
For those finishing graduate school, the average drop in salary was 8.9 percent, while college and vocational school applicants saw starting salary declines of 5.5 percent and 3.8 percent respectively, a survey of 1,033 companies between April 13 and April 17 showed.
The starting salaries for masters degree graduates, college graduates and vocational school graduates this year were on average NT$30,517 (US$924), NT$27,257 and NT$25,214 respectively.
The survery also found that this was the first year that salaries in biotechnology research and development, regardless of degrees, exceeded those in information technology (IT) engineering. Biotech R&D was offering NT$30,511 per month this year to IT R&D’s NT$30,326, the company said.
However, looking at the employment picture from an enterprise point of view, the rankings of the top four paying industries remained the same from last year — IT, financial services/ insurance, manufacturing and real estate related — at NT$29,226, NT$27,297, NT$27,208 and NT$26,946 respectively.
Chiu said the jobs that had seen the biggest drops in pay were typically in low-entry-to-barriers fields such as administration and general management.
This showed the need for students to pursue a focused specialty in order to make themselves more marketable, she said.
“Because of the global recession and the subsequent rounds of unpaid leave, pay cuts and layoffs, new job seekers need to be more realistic about their prospects,” Chiu said.
Taipei-based real-estate broker Sinyi Realty Co (信義房屋), however, is going against the market trend, offering a NT$50,000 starting salary for Greater China realty personnel, as well as NT$40,000 (for six months) internal staff positions.
“Because of the nature of the real estate business, Sinyi prefers to hire brokers with no sales experience, hence no baggage,” Sinyi human resources vice president Chung Wen-hsiung (鍾文雄) said.
“But all job seekers need to demonstrate qualities of optimism, ambition, curiosity, persistence and a high threshold for pressure and repeated setbacks in order to stand out from their peers,” he said.
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