Careers
We are good at getting our graduates jobs.
Nearly 95% of all QMUL graduates are in employment or further study six months after graduation.
Career prospects after QMUL?
A degree in Computer Science at Queen Mary offers excellent career prospects, whether you want to go onto to do a postgraduate Masters degree or directly embark on a career.
In a recent government survey it was shown that nearly 95% of all QMUL graduates are in employment or further study six months after graduation, ranking us sixth best for student employment.
We exceed benchmark standards for student employment indicators and our former students earn the second highest graduate salaries in the UK according to the Sunday Times' 2004 survey: £21,686 compared to the national average of £16,393 (The Sunday Times University Guide, 12 September 2004).
As MSc and PhD degrees are increasingly valued in career terms, many of our graduates go on to complete advanced degrees typically leading to higher-valued, specialised employment. We are proud of the fact that many of our students are capable of pursuing this path following their first degree at Queen Mary.
The University of London status
certainly helped in me moving into my first IT job
at JPMorgan FundsHub
Computer scientists: jobs or jobless?
That's an important question. What happens when you graduate?
UK Government and industry are now actually worried that there are too few computer scientists to fill the jobs in the future,
and they predict that from 2006 to 2012 there will be 216,000 new jobs in the area.
In fact, this same trend has been echoed by the US Department of Labour: "Computer scientists are expected to be among the fastest growing occupations through 2012. Employment of these computer specialists is expected to grow much faster than the average for all occupations as organisations continue to adopt and integrate increasingly sophisticated technologies."
Other sources also report continuous and increasingly rapid growth in the IT market (you can read more on the current and future trends of the IT sector at www.prospects.ac.uk).
With entirely new
disciplines developing from the explosion of information available, this
field is unlikely to remain idle. Think of the opportunities in
medicine, robotics, information technology, security - new areas that
are wide open. As with engineering, the salaries and hiring are strongly
linked to economies, but with cellular phones, HDTV, MP3 players, and
the like all blending into portable devices, the potential for new
graduates looks promising.
Small sum = large salary
There are approximately 120 universities in the UK, so even if they all offered computer science (which they don't)
and each programme graduated 100 computer science students per year (which they don't) then that would be around 12,000
graduates per year, which is only 4% of the projected amount.
The country cannot work without computers and computer scientists, so this means that a lot of good well paid careers are going to be around in the future.
Career paths
A typical career path for our graduates would involve starting out as trainee software architects, web developers, multimedia
specialists or systems analysts, and progressing to senior roles within a period of five to six years.
From there, many organisations have clear routes into team leadership and more senior management, or, if you prefer to
remain technical, interesting and lucrative careers are available as specialist programmers or consultants.
Other exciting possibilities include employing your web development and multimedia skills as a member of a multi-disciplinary development
team or as a key member of a web consultancy company.
However, these prospects represent only a very small sample of the wide range of options available in today's IT industry, and with the rapid changes in technology and software development, new roles are constantly emerging.
Some of our graduates
Because computer science is everywhere, our graduates can find themselves into most careers, whether working on pure or
applied computer science or branching out into different disciplines and vocations.
Our students have gone on to work for banks, mobile phone companies, the NHS, newspapers, schools, IT consultancies, financial
consultancies, online betting companies and some have even gone on to study medicine.
About three-quarters of our graduates obtain jobs in the software industry - as systems analysts, programmers, database managers or working in e-commerce - in a variety of companies. Others find employment in jobs that make use of their communication and analysis skills such as management consultancy.
As a graduate of Queen Mary, our Careers Service will help you to make the best of your job applications and keep you up to date with all the latest vacancies.
Here are a few examples of where some of our recent graduates have gone on to work in the various industry sectors:
- Enterprise Risk Services Consultant, Deloitte & Touche
- Project Manager, Arab Bank
- Software Consultant, Agena Ltd
- Games Designer, Sony Inc.
- Network Management Systems Engineer, BT Suncordia Solutions
- Support Assistant, Cartier Ltd
- Graduate Software Engineer, Convergys EMEA
- Technology Analyst, Deloitte & Touche
- Computer Analyst, Ericsson
- Programmer, Greek Bank
- IT Consultant, Intasal
- IT Analyst, J.P.Morgan
- Data Analyst, OFSTED
- Analyst, One2One
- Computer Engineer, Sapient
- Software Engineer, Stream UK
- Financial Programmer, FT Interactive Data
- IT Project Developer, Coral
- Systems Analyst, Ford Motor Company