Best Places to Work After Graduation

Graduating from college can give one both a feeling of accomplishment and uneasiness. It takes a lot of hard work to do well in college and graduate. As graduation arrives (and the fear of having to pay back student loans comes), many worry about the next step to take, which is usually to try and secure a good-paying job and start to establish some sort of career.

Sure, there will be a little fear and uneasiness upon graduating, knowing you will have bills to pay, as payments for student loans will soon be due. It's not easy finding that perfect job fresh out of college.

Best Companies to work for

You'll need an idea of where you'd like to start your career. Of course, this all depends on your major, as you may already have a few companies in mind. There are select companies out there that are considered top employers for grads, as they offer great advancement through the company as well as a good starting salary and benefits.

Recommended Resources:

The Top Places to Launch a Career

  1. Deloitte
  2. Ernst & Young
  3. PricewaterhouseCoopers
  4. KPMG
  5. U.S. State Dept.
  6. Goldman Sachs
  7. Teach for America
  8. Target
  9. J.P. Morgan
  10. IBM

Source: BusinessWeek

Please take these 2009 rankings by BusinessWeek lightly, as they only include companies that participated in their survey. Companies like Google (for example), who were ranked 7th the previous year, were not included in this ranking because they declined to participate in BusinessWeek's survey.

Other Employer Rankings

Universum Ranking
The Universum IDEAL Employer Survey, taken by more than 60,000 undergraduates, is a ranking of what students see as being the “best place to work”.

  1. Google
  2. Walt Disney
  3. Apple Computer
  4. U.S. Department of State
  5. FBI
  6. Ernst & Young
  7. Peace Corps
  8. NASA
  9. PricewaterhouseCoopers
  10. Teach for America

Fortune Ranking
Though maybe a little outdated now, back in 2007 Fortune published a list of 20 Great Employers for New Grads. Here they ranked companies based on perks to new hires just out of college, including salary, benefits, workplace flexibility, and growth opportunities within the company.

The Top 10:

  1. Lehman Brothers
  2. Electronic Arts
  3. Pricewaterhouse Coopers
  4. Randstad
  5. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
  6. Rockwell Collins
  7. Teach for America
  8. Qualcomm
  9. Key Bank
  10. Northrop Grumman