Business

The companies where South African students most want to work

Staff Writer

 ·30 Aug 2017

The South African Graduate Employers Association has published the winners of its 2017 SAGEA Employer Awards, naming the companies most favoured by South African students across 24 sectors.

Launched in 2010, the survey is conducted on an annual basis to help SAGEA members to review the success of their graduate campaigns and help plan their future recruitment programmes.

Research for the 2016 list took place between March and May 2016, using an online questionnaire, drawing 1,960 candidate responses.

Each candidate was asked to name up to two organisations whom they felt had the best graduate programme in specific sectors or industry groups with which they were familiar.

There were no lists of organisations to choose from – their responses were entirely unprompted – to help ensure that no preconceptions or assumptions were made regarding a predefined group of employers which candidates may associate with specific sectors, SAGEA said.

In the accountancy sector, PwC gained more than a fifth of the vote. Between them, Standard Bank, First National Bank and Nedbank gained more than three-fifths of the votes within the banking sector.

The legal sector was very closely fought, with few votes separating the top three employers, SAGEA said.

Three organisations secured first place in two different sectors: Sasol gained the most votes in both the chemical & pharmaceutical and engineering or industrial sectors; Unilever secured the FMCG and manufacturing sectors; while Discovery was in first place for both the health and insurance sectors.

Here are the companies South African students chose as the best (changes and new additions from 2016 in green):

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