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Scotland

To look a bit further into the difference between Scottish and UK graduates we took all the graduates registered on graduate-jobs.com that graduated between 2009 and 2014. We split this number up between universities in Scotland and universities elsewhere in the UK. We then decided see what differences could be drawn between Scottish graduates and rest of the UK (rUK) graduates.

Sectors

These figures show the most popular sectors that graduates want to work in. When registering with graduate-jobs.com, graduates can select multiple sectors that they would like to start their career in. From the figures we can see that the majority of the popular sectors are similar between graduates from both Scotland and the rest of the UK. The only notable difference between the desired sectors of Scottish and rUK graduates is that while Human Resources is the sixth most desired place for rUK graduatesmissing out of the top 5 by 0.4%, while the amount of Scottish graduates wanting to work in Finance falls to ninth place in desired sectors missing out by 4.6%.

Most popular sectors for Scottish university graduates

Degree Classification

This is one of the more interesting discoveries we made when looking at the data and differences between the two. We discovered that in Scotland it is a lot harder to receive a higher classification for your degree. As you can see from the graph, in Scotland only 6% of the graduates registered on graduate-jobs.com received a First, while the number was much higher in the rest of the UK, at 9.8%. The same can be applied for the two next lower classifications of degree, the 2.1 and 2.2. It is only the third, at 7% over the rUK's 3.8% that you are more likely to receive.

Degree classifications for Scottish university graduates

Degree Courses

Both sets of degrees studied by rUK and Scottish graduates points once again to very similar attitudes and academic pursuits. For example, from the data we can see that the top three most popular degrees in the UK are also the three most popular types of degree in Scotland, with the following three exactly the same just in a different order. From this data, it is almost impossible to draw any conclusions except that similarity of both Scottish and rUK students' studying habits.

Most popular subject for Scottish university graduates

Work Experience

When registering, we ask students and graduates if they have undertaken work experience or not and it is in this key employability factor that we see a difference between Scottish and rUK graduates. Whether it is an internship or a part time job, graduates from Scotland are much more likely to have work experience than those from the rest of the UK. However, the difference is so small that no certain conclusion can be drawn from it.

Percentage of Scottish university graduates with work experience