ONE OF the most common reasons adults return to education is to improve their career prospects, but will a few more letters after your name automatically make you more employable, asks Caroline Madden

Will all those late nights spent cramming for exams necessarily boost your earning potential? In other words, is there a definite return on investment?

When it comes to a primary degree, the answer is an unequivocal yes. The most recent Quarterly National Household Survey (March to May 2008), conducted by the Central Statistics Office (CSO), showed the unemployment rate for graduates was 2.4 per cent, compared to a national average of 5.3 per cent.

Although a master's degree can be valuable if, for example, a graduate wishes to transfer into a different specialism, it doesn't necessarily give them a competitive edge in the jobs market, as employers often value work experience over theoretical learning.

Similarly, a PhD can help to secure a position in academia, but doctorate-holders can find themselves overqualified for many jobs in the wider workforce.

The key is to do plenty of research in advance in order to have realistic expectations of what the course can actually do for you.

A survey carried out on the gradireland.com website found a third of respondents considering postgraduate study believed the qualification would boost their earning power by more than €5,000 when they started work.

The average graduate starting salary this year is €27,224, so this would represent a premium of close to over 18 per cent.

Unfortunately, there appears to be a large gap between their expectations and the reality. One of the findings of the gradireland graduate salary survey 2008 was that having a postgraduate qualification only makes a difference to salary in a quarter of the companies surveyed.

Employers in the retailing, sales and customer services sector were found to be the least likely to offer higher salaries to those with postgraduate qualifications.

According to Ronan Colleran, managing director at recruitment firm Accreate, certain postgraduate courses such as an MBS in finance can be relied upon to make a person more marketable. "An employer is going to take [someone with] an MBS in finance ahead of a commerce graduate for a role in financial services or banking, for example," he says.