Master students at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM) have little trouble finding employment. According to RSM’s annual Graduate Placement Report, close to three-quarters of the graduates land a job within three months of rounding off the programme. Virtually all MSc students find a job within one year after graduating. In addition, the brand-new alumni have a strong international orientation, and their salaries lie above the Dutch national average.
The results published in the Graduate Placement Report show that if employers want to add RSM students to their team, they need to move quickly. Around one- fifth of RSM’s MSc students start actively looking for a job six months before rounding off the programme. And over half are actively hunting for a job in the final month before graduation.
What’s more, it doesn’t take them long to find a job either. Close to three-quarters of the respondents (73%) secured employment within three months of starting their job hunt. Indeed, over half of them had already found a job before actually graduating. Virtually all RSM MSc graduates (86%) were employed within one year of rounding off their studies.
Working in other countries
The Graduate Placement Report also reflected RSM’s strong international character. Its master students come from dozens of different countries, and more than two-thirds of the students from non-European countries stay in the Netherlands following graduation. What’s more: RSM students are an adventurous lot. After graduation, nearly one-third of them started working in a country other than their country of origin or the Netherlands. The graduates of 2014 went on to work in 42 different countries, for 237 different companies – in most cases large multinationals with over 10,000 employees such as Shell, PwC, Deloitte and Unilever. Moreover, they tend to start out in relatively demanding, high-level positions.
The appeal of working abroad is clear: recent graduates often have better prospects of permanent employment if they take a job outside the Netherlands. But regardless of the lower chance of an open-ended contract if graduates decide to stay in the Netherlands, their monthly salary is higher than the national average. The average salary of a fresh RSM alumnus is EUR 2,912 per month, compared to EUR 2,783 euro for other MSc graduates starting out on the Dutch job market. In addition, the graduates’ average salary is slightly higher (EUR 104) than that published in last year’s Report. This puts the average monthly salary of all RSM graduates – working in either the Netherlands or abroad – at EUR 2,950.
The graduates most frequently find a job via their own network, through an internship or by developing professional connections with the aid of social network platforms like LinkedIn. Special events that allow employers and students to meet one another and exchange views on campus are also considered useful by the alumni.
Survey
The Graduate Placement Report presents the results of a survey recently held among students who rounded off their Master of Science at RSM between 1 January 2014 and 31 August 2014. This survey was held in March 2015, at a point when most of the recent graduates were taking their initial steps on their career path. Feel free to read the RSM 2015 Graduate Placement Report online for further information on the new RSM alumni, including their average salary levels and different backgrounds.
Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM) is a top-tier European business school and ranked among the top three for research. RSM provides ground-breaking research and education furthering excellence in all aspects of management and is based in the international port city of Rotterdam – a vital nexus of business, logistics and trade. RSM’s primary focus is on developing business leaders with international careers who carry their innovative mindset into a sustainable future thanks to a first-class range of bachelor, master, MBA, PhD and executive programmes. RSM also has offices in the Amsterdam Zuidas business district and in Taipei, Taiwan. www.rsm.nl