Employment and skills of graduates in Sociology (2013-2014)

The data are based on the “Professional condition of graduates in Sociology” survey carried out in 2013 with the aim of analyzing the employment condition of graduates of three-year courses in Sociology.

 

The survey was promoted by the Department of Sociology and Social Research of the University of Milan-Bicocca, in collaboration with AIS – Italian Association of Sociology and all the universities where a degree course in Sociology was active in 2013. The research collected data on all graduates in three-year degree courses in Sociology (class number 36) in the academic years between 2004/2005 and 2009/2010. The choice of this time period has ensured the observation of graduates at least two and a half years after graduation, in order to avoid that the condition of non-employment, especially for the last levers, was connected with the limited time available to seek work.
The survey has adopted a mixed CAWI – CATI strategy. The questionnaire was proposed only to graduates who had an e-mail address, while graduates without an electronic address were contacted by telephone, in order to acquire the e-mail address to which send the link to fill in. The dataset distributed includes data relating to 3,779 graduates in Sociology.

 

The areas covered are as follows:

• General information: gender, year of birth, type of diploma, year of enrolment, etc.
• Training path: structure of the university path and motivational profile with respect to the training choices made;
• Transition from the university to the labour market: working conditions (the current and also such one characterizing the transition from obtaining the three-year degree to the current job), search for a job and any reasons for not searching;
• Work situation: job, type of work, type of contract, work sector, income and channels used to find such employment. Possible assessment of the actual improvement of the work situation from the achievement of the degree for those who were already doing a job before graduation;
• Consistency of the work with the credentials/educational skills acquired: importance of a set of credentials/competences for the performance of their work or for the internship activity;
• Over-education and misalignment: relevance of the qualification to the work carried out and satisfaction with the work itself;
• Satisfaction with the degree course: degree of satisfaction with the degree course followed and the skills/credentials acquired, assessment of skills acquired during the training course;
• Socio-demographic data: information on the family background

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Keywords: education, employment, graduates, labour, sociology