The Annual Surveys of Journalism & Mass Communications Graduates is out, and once again it’s critical reading for anyone looking for a job in the industry.

Here’s a list of some of the key findings as they relate to multimedia skills:

• Whether you plan to work in journalism or PR, you’re going to need to know how to write for the Web.  Radio employees do the least amount of this with 66.7% of 2012 graduates saying that’s part of the job — daily newspaper employees do the most with 86.8% who are regularly writing for online.
• Another critically important component of the job for newly employed grads is working with social media.  A whopping 55.5% say that this is part of what they do, 42.1% say they use the Web as a promotional tool in their positions.
• About a third of employed graduates also say they’re either managing Web operations (35.7%) or creating and using blogs (31.5%).
• Other key skills include knowing how to produce photos and graphics for the Web with 38.8% of all journalism and mass comm graduates working in communications saying that they use those skills.  A little more than a fifth of graduates say they produce video for the Web (22.5%) or are producing and designing Web pages (21.8%) on the job.

The headline from the survey that’s getting lots of attention is that more journalism and mass comm grads are now getting jobs period — 65.6% reported holding a full-time job roughly six to eight months after graduation — that’s up about 3 percent from 2011.  They’re also making a little more money overall.

Bachelor’s degree recipients who found full-time work earned on average $32,000 in 2012, compared with $31,000 a year earlier. The increase offset the impact of inflation.

But what continues to be disturbing to us at Advancing the Story is that the rates of hiring for minority vs. non-minority students is out of whack. Once again, minority graduates in 2012 had a more difficult time in the job market than did graduates who were not members of racial and ethnic minorities.  Slightly more than 60% of minority graduates found jobs vs. just under 73% of non-minority students were employed full-time.  This discrepancy has become more pronounced rather than less so in the past nine years.