Where do final-year students aspire to work, and how do they rank their future employers?
The recent turmoil in the City and predictions of an impending recession have done little to inspire confidence in the job market, but the prospects for students leaving university this summer remain very good.
Graduate vacancies are at their highest for a decade. On campus, there has been intense competition between the UK's top employers to hire the best new talent. But which employers do final-year students aspire to work for? At the eleventh annual ceremony for The Times Graduate Recruitment Awards, held last week at the British Library in London, more than 250 graduate recruiters gathered to discover which recruiters had been named the graduate employers of choice for 2008. The awards, based on the results of face-to-face interviews with more than 15,000 final-year students from universities across the UK, was conducted five weeks ago by High Fliers Research. And for the fifth year running the graduates voted the professional services company PricewaterhouseCoopers the most desirable recruiter.
The majority of the other awards are for the graduate employers of choice for popular career destinations, including accountancy, marketing and IT, as voted for by finalists seeking jobs within the sector.
The winners
- PricewaterhouseCoopers - the overall winner (for the fifth year running) of the most desirable recruiter award.
- Procter & Gamble - both the marketing and the sales awards for the eighth consecutive year.
- Accenture - named the top recruiter in consulting, an award it has held since 2000 and the best graduate recruitment brochure
- award for the third year running.
- Tesco - scooped the general management award from last year's top choice, Aldi
- Marks & Spencer - retained the graduate employer of choice title for retail
- The NHS - Europe's largest employer won the human resources sector award
- IBM - voted the top employer in the IT sector, ahead of Microsoft and Google
- GlaxoSmithKline - No 1 for research and development for the sixth time running
- Rolls-Royce - took the engineering sector's employer of choice award, beating the 2007 winner, Shell, into second place.
- Goldman Sachs - named the Square Mile's top graduate employer for investment banking for an unprecedented eleventh year
- PricewaterhouseCoopers - accountancy sector winner for the fifth time
- HSBC - first place for those interested in other areas of finance
- JPMorgan - judged to have had the best graduate recruitment website
- Clifford Chance - regained the award for the top law firm from rivals Linklaters who were forced into third place behind Allen & Overy
- Savills - the upmarket estate agents, won the prize for best property employer for a second year
- The BBC - won the media category, polling more than 90 per cent of students' votes
- Transport for London - took the leading recruiter for transport and logistics jobs title
- The Civil Service - best-known for its Fast Stream programme, was the top-rated public sector employer
Source: The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers 2008
| 
