Majority of Recent Balkan Graduates Find Jobs

Eighty per cent of former students in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Serbia have found a job by around six months after graduation, according to a new report by the Belgrade-based Centre for Education Policy.

The same amount of recent university-leavers are working in the field in which they graduated, the report says.

"This has ruined the myth of having a lawyer working at the market or as a waiter," Ivana Zivadinovic of the Centre for Education Policy told BIRN.

The centre has been conducting the research since 2011 on a sample of 42,240 graduates from the three Balkan countries.

According to the research, the percentage of students now in employment is highest among those who graduated in information technology and computing, mathematics, architecture, business, management and administration.

Least successful are those who graduated in the fields of ecology, biology and medical science, the research says.

It also shows that the average salary of graduate students is around 589 euro. The general average salary in Serbia is 350 euro.

Zivadinovic noted that 46 per cent of recent graduates in Serbia are working in the public sector.

"The most common way of getting a job (32.8 per cent) in both the public and private sectors are personal connections - friends and family," Zivadinovic added.

Only 12.7 per cent of people have found a job through the National Employment Service.

The unemployment rate is 22.4 per cent in Serbia, 44.6 per cent in Bosnia and 14 per cent in Montenegro.