How school kids are skipping uni on the fast track to six figure salaries

One firm is headhunting in Western Sydney schools in a bid to snap up smart kids before they go to university – and they could soon be earning big bucks.

A multinational firm is headhunting Western Sydney students finishing Year 12 because it is so hard to find workers and they can train them just as well as universities can.

KPMG Australia plans to expand its high school graduate program next year which sees students skip university completely and train up in the burgeoning tech field where jobs, including as a JavaScript Developer, now command an average salary of $147,857 a year.

KPMG’s head of technology consulting Richard Marrison said they simply could not find enough people coming out of university to fill roles.

“We just got a shortage of people in the industry and actually getting enough people into the industry is very hard,” he said.

“There’s a lot of really smart young people out there that for whatever reason, either social or economic or cultural, don’t choose to go to university.”

Students Lance Woodgate, Phoenix Valentino Rufo and Xavier Dolcel are involved in KPMG’s initiative to get keen young people into its workforce straight after finishing the HSC. Picture: Richard Dobson

In a bid to tap the pool of smart young people, he said KPMG last year identified schools where less students went on to university but still had good results which showed the students were smart.

“We actually went to those schools that tend to have a lower number of students who go on to university. So we specifically targeted some schools that have good results, but just send a lower number of kids to university for whatever reason.”

He said the firm recruited 10 students from high school last year but they now plan to expand the program whereby students are rotated around different sections of the business.

“We’ve had reduced immigration and the demand for the tech skills is just going up significantly,” he said.

Lance Woodgate graduated from Erskine Park High last year and knocked back numerous early offers to go to university.

“I have worked with computers my whole life, so when I got the opportunity to work in technology consulting, it just seemed really interesting,” he said.

KPMG is a multinational tax advisory and accounting services company. Picture: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

In the 10 months since he has been in the program, he has learnt how to code in both JavaScript and Python.

“It offers a lot more real world working skills which you probably wouldn’t learn at university,” he said.

“I have learnt a lot of technical skills but also learnt a lot of soft skills like working in a team, communicating and managing your time when you have deadlines and feel overloaded and how to deal with that.”

Jobs website Seek released a report finding that IT roles have seen salaries rise by as much as 20 per cent since the Covid pandemic with an Infrastructure Specialist’s average salary going up 21 per cent to $147,251 a year.

Meanwhile a data modeller now commands an average salary of $158,276 while an IT “security adviser” receives on average $165,950 a year.