Work is not all about money. But let’s not pretend that for many fresh grads, potential earnings don’t play a huge role in deciding what career path to pursue.
So say you’re one of those grads (or about to be). You’ve worked hard in school and you’re eager to find a job that will allow you to feel on solid ground financially — begin paying off any student debt, live a comfortable life, and maybe even start saving for a home.
You decide that you want to make at least $100,000 a year. But how to do it?
Well, you’ve set an ambitious goal. Based on our survey of typical graduate salaries, not a single sector pays fresh grads an average salary of $100,000 or more — not even close.
But ambitious doesn’t mean impossible. Not only can you score a job with six-figure compensation (or create one for yourself), but you can put yourself on the fast track to a high-growth career… if you’re willing to work for it.
To help you get started, we’ve come up with four different pathways to get your annual earnings over the $100,000 line. Since we’re assuming that you’ve already graduated or are about to finish your degree, we’re not going to cheat and simply tell you to study something high-earning like medicine, law, or engineering either.
We’re also going to go out on a limb and presume you don’t have a big pile of money sitting around that can bring you $100,000 a year in investment returns. Our ideas all involve work, not passive income.
In this guide:
I. Get one of these jobs at one of these firms
Ready? Let’s dive in!
We’ve already said it, but we’ll say it again — the vast majority of graduate jobs don’t pay anywhere close to $100,000 a year.
Average graduate salaries include:
The highest-paid sector, on average, is mining, oil, and gas at $81,834.
But, when it comes to salary, not graduate jobs are created equal. Based on our survey of 8,611 fresh grads, 2.2 percent of graduate jobs pay at least $100,000 a year.
We should note that more than half of those jobs require you to have a highly specialized degree (like law or software engineering, for example). However, that also means that almost half don't!
This means that while you’ll certainly need considerable skills, talent, and work ethic in order to earn a starting salary that’s approaching double what most of your peers will be making, you won’t necessarily have to come from one specific educational background.
We’ve come up with a list of the most common job titles that pay $100,000 or more and tend to be open to applicants holding at least a small range of degrees. We also found a few firms that tend to offer high-paying roles to fresh grads (usually for the specific job titles we’re covering).
Read on to learn more about both.
Top job titles for grads making at least $100k a year. Source: Prosple survey of 8,611 fresh grads.
No surprise here. Based on our survey data, most top-paying graduate jobs are in the financial sector.
While a job at a local bank branch typically won’t net you much more than $60,000 a year, high finance is a different world altogether. The most common high-paying role on our list is trader, or someone who works for an investment bank, hedge fund, or trading firm and makes trades in the securities or commodities markets.
Now, traders can ultimately make millions, especially once they earn the trust of their firms and get to manage larger investment portfolios. But even junior traders typically receive strong compensation — at the cost of long hours on the job.
Also offering high-paying potential is a job as a business or financial analyst. While analysts work for companies in all sectors, those working for investment firms can see especially good compensation in exchange for their role in watching the market, identifying opportunities, and helping to drive investment decisions.
However, banking isn’t the only route to $100,000. The third most common job title, area manager, offers a different approach.
As an area manager, you’d work in the retail sector (Aldi is a top employer here) managing several local retail stores. These jobs often require university degrees but not much in the way of formal work experience, so you may be able to find a graduate program that trains you to be an area manager fresh out of school.
You’d be in charge of everything from hiring to logistics and would gain experience managing a team right out of the gate.
We’ll be honest — the last two job titles on our list (associate and graduate) are vague, at best. Depending on the context, they can mean almost anything.
But this is where your specific employer matters. If you can get into the right graduate program, you’ll be setting yourself up for significant financial success.
So, who pays the most?
Top employers who pay grads $100k or more for roles that don’t hire for only one specific degree like medicine, law, or engineering. Source: Prosple graduate survey of 8,611 fresh grads.
None of this is a sure thing, as your graduate earnings depend on a range of factors. But based on our survey data — and if you’re a fit for the right role — these six employers are more likely than most to offer you a six-figure salary as a fresh grad:
A medium-sized trading firm, IMC describes itself as “as much a technology firm as a trading house.” With a heavy focus on innovation and using tech to drive results, IMC regularly hires fresh grads for junior trader roles and notes that it typically looks for candidates with a background in computer science, engineering, math, finance, economics, physics, or actuarial studies.
One of the largest banking and financial services companies in the world, JP Morgan employs north of 240,000 people. While the firm offers a range of different roles, your best shot at six figures is likely in an analyst or investment banker position. The company routinely looks for applicants from both liberals arts and STEM backgrounds, so you won't necessarily be limited by your degree.
SIG describes itself as “a global quantitative trading firm founded with an entrepreneurial mindset and analytical approach to decision making.” With offices around the world, including a team of over 150 people based in Australia, the company takes a heavily algorithm-based approach to trade and generally looks to hire grads with strong math, science, or engineering backgrounds.
A 100-ish-person Australian trading group that's gone international, Tibra Capital operates out of Sydney, Austinmer, and London with a mission of beating larger firms at their own game. Like similar firms on our list, they typically look to hire from the pool of graduates with STEM degrees. The company notes that “our founders’ ambition to make their mark, back their skills and judgment, and shape their own future [defines] Tibra’s culture and success.”
A major change of pace from our previous focus on high finance, Aldi is a giant international chain of supermarkets that operates roughly 600 stores in Australia alone. The company regularly recruits talented grads to train as area managers — responsible for overseeing several Aldi locations at a time — and unlike some of the other firms on our list, is happy to hire graduates from liberal arts or creative backgrounds.
Jarden is an investment bank that describes itself as “the leading equities house in New Zealand with an extensive track record of success.” A mid-sized firm that also recently opened an office in Australia, Jarden positions itself as offering the level of opportunity common at larger competitors along with the focus and support of working for a smaller team and is open to hiring grads from a wide range of academic disciplines.
For additional high-paying employers and career inspiration, check out our list of 100 highest paying graduate jobs in Australia.
But what if you don’t want to go work for an established company?
Maybe you don’t have a STEM background (not all the jobs or firms we mentioned above require that, but it does tend to help). Maybe you don’t want to work a traditional 9 to 5 schedule or don’t like having to go into an office.
Fortunately, that doesn’t mean you can’t make a great living. Now, more than ever, you can build a real career — and even net a six-figure salary — out of being a freelancer.
Even better, the vast majority of freelancer roles (among those based in the knowledge economy) are remote. You’ll be able to work from home and serve clients anywhere in the world.
As a freelancer, you provide a service to businesses that either don’t want to hire someone to do the job full-time or need additional support for their existing team.
So to start getting work, you’ve first got to figure out what service you’re going to offer. And to do that, what you need to do is identify a problem that businesses face and figure out how you can solve it for your potential clients.
Of course, you should consider what problem areas to look at. Most companies handle product development and sales internally, and you probably don’t have enough real-world experience to become a consultant.
That means your best option is probably to provide some form of digital marketing services. This could be content creation, copywriting, managing ads, social media, web design, video editing, graphics — there are a ton of different options out there.
We encourage you to research different options. Find a common freelance role and start watching YouTube videos to learn how to do it. You can also take an online course and earn a certification.
Pick something that aligns with your strengths or university experience. If you studied creative writing, for example, you’d probably do well as a copywriter. Maybe you’ve been active on TikTok for the last three years — why not start charging clients to boost their own presence on the app?
Whatever you do, though, don’t try to be all things to all people. You’ll be setting yourself up for failure.
Instead, you need to start by identifying one particular service you want to offer (say, web design) and one specific audience that you serve (lawyers in private practice, perhaps).
Why? While it may seem counterintuitive to narrow down your potential offerings or client base, especially when you’re just starting out, what you’re actually doing is giving yourself room to become an expert in your particular niche.
By getting really good at doing one thing for one particular type of client, you’ll be able to build a reputation that will make it easier to attract new clients. You’ll also do a better job at delivering results than a freelancer who doesn’t know your particular niche, which will significantly reduce your competition and give you the ability to charge more for your work.
When choosing a niche, the more specific, the better. Think about it — you can be one among millions of content creators out there, or you can become a go-to person for wellness podcast hosts looking to make short-form video content out of their podcast episodes.
You get the idea.
To start getting gigs, all you need to do is sign up for a freelance platform and start putting yourself out there. Some of the top options include:
However, you may not want to limit yourself to booking through a third-party platform. Especially as you begin to establish yourself and build a regular client base, you’ll probably want to create a website. Even today, most businesses have websites and if you’re making enough money by freelancing to support yourself, then congratulations, you’re a business.
You’ll also probably want to market yourself on at least one social media platform. If you’re doing any kind of content creation, this can be a great way to show people what you’re capable of.
LinkedIn can also be a fantastic way to drum up business. Here, you can identify potential clients you’d like to work with, follow them, and spend several weeks making thoughtful comments on their posts that add real value.
Once you’ve done this for a little while, those prospects will probably start to recognize you. That’s when you can reach out with a short message saying that you can do X to help them grow their business and would love to talk.
That approach should give you some leads that aren’t ice-cold. But you can also go even further and use this same formula as a way to build referral relationships, which are the gold standard for creating warm leads.
Here’s how you do that:
Start building real relationships with other players in your niche and many of those players will be more than happy to refer clients your way.
This part is essential. If you want to make $100,000 a year, you’ve got to do better than taking on tasks for $15 an hour.
Now, eventually, you’ll need to figure out whether you want to look for retainer clients, per-project work, or a mix of both. When you’re first starting out, though, you’ll probably be getting mostly per-project work, especially if you’re booking gigs through a freelancer platform.
So how much should you charge per project? That depends on what service you’re providing, market rates, and how much value you can bring.
But as a general rule of thumb, you need to figure out a consistent production schedule. Let’s say that you’re making one-page websites. You can do two of these per week, or one gig every three days.
That comes out to roughly one hundred websites per year. So you’ll need to charge $1,000 per site in order to hit your magic number.
But this is all assuming you can book your design calendar full each month. What if you can’t?
A hundred projects mean a hundred different clients. That adds up to an enormous amount of time spent drumming up business, pitching your work, and otherwise communicating — all of which will cut into the time you have to actually make those one-pagers.
Maybe it makes more sense to charge $2,000 for a site and figure out a way you can add enough value to justify the extra money.
The point is that you want to find the sweet spot where you’re:
The truth is that setting rates is an art as much as a science. At least to some extent, most freelancers are making it up as they go along.
Remember: There will always be someone willing to work for less than you want to charge. There will also usually be someone asking for more.
Experiment, do your best, and — once you have a portfolio of work you can point to — don’t be afraid to set your rates higher than what makes you feel comfortable.
Fortune often does favour the bold.
The line between freelancer and founder is blurry at best, so everything we covered in the previous section is relevant here. But what if you want to start a business that’s bigger than yourself?
If you’re founding a real company — one where you aim to grow, hire employees, and provide a product or service at scale — then you’ll have a much wider array of options than if you’re simply operating as a freelancer.
Now, we want to say upfront that this is a high-risk way to shoot for your six-figure salary (and beyond). In fact, we’d go so far as to say that most fresh grads shouldn’t launch their own startup without having a few years of work experience under their belts.
However — we also get it. If you’re a born entrepreneur and would rather take on the risks, make the mistakes, and ride the chaos, you’re living in a time when there are more avenues than ever to launch your own business.
In fact, we’re living proof. Prosple has been built without relying on venture capital or other external backers, so we’re happy to tell you that you don’t need connections at funds like Sequoia Capital or Blackbird Ventures in order to open your doors.
Here are a few notes on getting started.
For the last two decades or so, the startup community (or at least the tech startup community) has been all about scale, scale, scale. Move fast and break things, right?
Err, maybe not. While that may work for businesses that do have significant external backing and can afford to operate for years before becoming profitable, the truth is that the vast majority of new companies don’t have that luxury.
(And many founders who are trying to raise funds in the rarified venture capital stratosphere are finding that there is less money available than there used to be.)
Since you’re probably not regularly rubbing elbows with the Marc Andreessons or Naval Ravikants of the world, we suggest trying something radical:
Okay, we’re kidding about the radical part. This is the time-honoured approach to building a business, but one that deserves renewed attention from a generation that has grown up watching companies like Lyft and Uber rake in tens of billions of investor dollars without ever turning a real profit.
In other words, you don’t need to set out to conquer the world. Instead, take the same approach you would as a freelancer — just identify a problem and figure out how to solve it in a profitable way.
If your problem is big enough and your solution powerful enough, the scaling part will follow naturally enough (albeit with a lot of time and effort). And you’ll be able to keep more equity in your company because you won’t be doling out chunks to investors.
If you’re solving a smaller problem (or a big problem on a smaller scale), great! Nearly all businesses are not Fortune 500 giants — there’s no reason why you can’t make an excellent living running a small or medium-sized firm.
Now, since our focus in this article is specifically on how to hit the magic $100,000 barrier, let’s think a little about how you can do that with a small business. Again, as with freelance work, you’ll want to do a little math.
Maybe your problem is that people want to feel like they’ve got good taste and your solution is producing stylish t-shirts. How many shirts will you need to sell per year at X price to reach your goal?
For this example, we’ll keep the math really simple.
With us so far?
Excellent. Now that $250,000 sales goal works out to about $685 dollars in sales each and every day of the year.
And at $50 a shirt, that means you’ll have to sell just under 14 shirts per day.
So, how to get there? If you can convert 3 per cent of visitors to your Shopify site (a reasonable target) then you’ll need to hit circa 500 visits per day.
In other words, once your friend has designed your first five SKUs and you’ve lined up a supplier to make them, your job is going to be all about sales, sales, sales.
Can you create buzz around your t-shirts on TikTok, Instagram, or fashion Reddit? Can you work with influencers (don’t be afraid to start by partnering with folks who have only a few thousand followers) to promote your product?
If so, boom! There’s your 14 sales a day — and your $100,000 in annual earnings.
Now again, this is all back-of-the-envelope math based around one simple business concept. But we hope it will help you see that creating a profitable business that solves a real problem (most people, after all, want to feel like they’ve got good taste) is quite doable.
If you set a big goal ($250,000 in sales) and break it down into discrete action steps (500 visitors per day), you’ll find that the rest is often just a matter of drive, patience, and focus.
Since we’ve just talked so much about sales, let’s… keep talking about it. Because working in a sales job can be a great way to earn $100,000 with no previous work experience.
Why? One magic word: commissions.
Sales roles often operate on what’s sometimes called a 60/40 compensation structure. Here’s what that means.
Let’s say you accept a sales position with Dell Technologies. Your base salary is $65,000 a year — not bad for a fresh grad, but nowhere close to $100,000, either.
Guess what though — your base salary is only 60 per cent of your possible compensation. If you do your job well, you’ll also be able to earn commissions totalling a bit over $43,000, which puts you comfortably over the six-figure line.
Of course, this presumes that you’ll be able to close enough deals to earn that extra $43,000 (and if you can’t, you may eventually find yourself out of a job and lose out on your base salary as well). But this brings us to another big advantage of sales roles — you don’t need to have years of industry experience in order to succeed.
Now, before we go further, we should clarify that we’re mostly (though not entirely) talking about business-to-business (B2B) sales here. If you’re working as a floor associate at a retail clothing store, for example, you’re probably not going to earn the sort of salary or commissions you’d need to hit $100,000.
But if you’ve got a sales job at a company looking to drum up business from other companies (or that sells especially lucrative consumer goods like cars or certain financial products), you can succeed simply through people skills, energy, and persistence. You’ll need to thoroughly understand whatever product or service you’re selling, too, but we’ll assume that if you’ve got the ambition to aim for a well-above-average payday right out of the university gate, you’ll be willing to put in the time to do that.
The truth is that hitting your sales quota is often simply a matter of making enough phone calls, sending enough emails, and building enough relationships. Whatever you lack in experience, you can make up for in hustle.
If you’re looking for a sales job, you’ll want to know what sort of job titles to keep your eye out for. We combed through our survey data to find out what titles fresh grads working in sales typically receive.
The truth is that there are a ton of sales titles out there. But some of the most common include:
In other words, if you see the word account, business development, or sales in the title, that’s a good indication you’re looking at the right kind of role.
Which companies hire salespeople? How about (almost) all of them!
Two of the only major sectors that don't generally need sales teams are direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands and healthcare. Almost every other industry, though — from manufacturing to management consulting to software — all need people to sell their goods and services.
For example, pick most any company on our list of the top 100 Australian employers and you’ll likely find they have a sales division or significant sales opportunities for certain roles.
A few examples include:
You get the picture.
Perhaps more than any other idea on our list, your youth will work to your advantage in sales. So if it feels like a fit for your personality, check out some of these companies (or most any others on Prosple Australia that catch your fancy).
Thanks for sticking with us this far. As your reward, we’ll leave you with a note of optimism:
You can do this.
You’ll have to work harder than many of your peers. You’ll also almost certainly have to put yourself out there, as none of the options on our list include roles where you can get on by simply keeping your head down.
But you already know all of that. So now, all you need to do is start. Begin your job search at one of the firms we’ve mentioned, start thinking about what problem you want to solve as a freelancer or a founder, or spend some time watching YouTube videos on sales techniques.
Take action. Don’t worry about failing, because you will. Just stick with it anyway.
And keep an eye on your bank balance. Eventually, you’re going to start to like what you see.
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