HAVING spent up to 40 hours a week throughout university in lectures or doing laboratory experiments, it’s no wonder that graduates of many scientific and technical disciplines are keen to put this to good use.

Yet almost 70 per cent of graduate jobs advertised in the UK are for any degree, which means that most university leavers do not get the chance to apply the knowledge acquired from their studies.

The most likely career path for science graduates is therefore research and development (R&D). According to The UK Graduate Careers Survey 2006, 10 per cent of graduates who left university last year opted for R&D jobs, making it the seventh most popular destination for the Class of 2006.

More than 80 per cent of applicants believed that such jobs would enable them to build on the work that they had done at university and 85 per cent said that it would bring the intellectual challenges that they wanted.

Nearly a third of the organisations featured in the latest edition of The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers have vacancies in R&D, although at most employers the number of places available to new graduates is quite small. One issue for job hunters is that for many scientific positions, employers insist on either a masters degree or a PhD rather than a BSc, which means that their graduate programmes are not open to those with only a first degree.

Within the graduate market there are three main groups of employers that regularly recruit science or technical graduates. The major chemical or pharmaceutical companies, such as AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer, are especially popular and together take on a few hundred graduates to work in R&D each year. The oil companies are also significant recruiters of chemical, petroleum, technology and research specialists. Shell, BP and Exxon-Mobil will have about 200 vacancies in these areas this year.

The third type of R&D employer is the defence industry. The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory is part of the Ministry of Defence and provides specialist technical services and research for the Government and the Armed Forces. It recruits up to 100 graduates each year to work in a variety of roles in biological and health sciences, systems analysis, operational research, physical sciences and engineering.

The private sector firm QinetiQ also works in the defence and security technology. It has a strong emphasis on imaginative scientific research and hires more than 200 new recruits each year.

Other key recruiters include the Environment Agency, which wants 30 graduates for its flood risk engineering scheme, and consumer goods companies such as Procter & Gamble and Unilever.

Starting salaries in the sector do not match remuneration available in management consulting or finance. Average packages in the area were about £18,800 in 2006, although some industries offer higher packages. However, the majority of graduates expect that they will enjoy good work-life balance and that their work will be interesting, challenging and rewarding.

Martin Birchall is editor of The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers

AVERAGE GRADUATE STARTING SALARIES In the chemical and pharmaceutical industry the average is £26,500. Graduates in the oil industry can expect to start on £28,000. Consumer goods companies are expecting to pay their new graduate recruits about £26,000 this year.

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