These are some of the conclusions that the Basque Youth Observatory has drawn from a report on joining the labour market that Lanbide, the Public Employment Service, recently published.
Lanbide's annual study on joining the labour market and university labour integration is based on the answers given by people who graduated from Basque universities (University of the Basque Country – UPV/EHU, Deusto University – UD – and Mondragon Unibertsitatea – MU) three years earlier about their current labour situation. Therefore, the latest data, from late 2019, reflect the situation of graduates who finished their studies in 2016.
The first thing to note is that these data correspond to 73% of graduates since this was the response rate to the questions asked.
Based on this fact, the study shows that by the end of 2019, 84% of these people were working. The rest were unemployed or still studying, mainly.
The employment rate was the same among men and women (84% in both cases) but was higher than the average in the case of graduates in technical studies (91%) or health studies (88%).
Among those employed (employees and self-employed), 87% indicated that the professional category of their employment was in line with their qualifications and another 80% stated that the work they performed was closely or fairly related to their studies. Graduates from health studies were the most likely to have jobs related to their studies (91%), while graduates in the field of humanities had the lowest level of study-related employment, two out of three (67%).
However, only 45% of all employed people had a stable job in 2019. And in this case, graduates in health-related studies, along with graduates in experimental studies, displayed the lowest figures regarding stable employment.
