Careers services Key metrics
Why Knowledge is Power
University careers services have many opportunities to collect data: information systems like SITS describe the student community, Careers Hub and other tools track student engagement, while the Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education survey (DLHE) reports on what students do after graduation – for the first six months at least. But how can careers services harness the power of all this information – and how can it help employers? Gary Argent, Managing Director, Graduate Transitions explains how smart use of some key metrics will help you focus on two useful indicators: engagement and impact…
Do students who
engage with the careers service in their first year tend to end up in
graduate level jobs more often? What about those who do placements, or who volunteer, or who have a mentor?
Many factors influence employment destinations, but having an idea of which interventions have the most impact helps to showcase the value of the careers service and promotes your activities to students and employers.
Student participation: tracking which students book (and turn up for…) guidance appointments, employer events and extracurricular activities (broken down by course and year of study) can identify groups that are not engaging with the careers service (or not engaging early enough) and help focus corrective action.
Employer activities: reviewing the number of recruiters visiting the campus each season helps identify sectors where more employer engagement is needed. Comparing visits to DLHE outcomes can help demonstrate ROI.
Academic engagement: highlighting academic colleagues that work closely with the service and looking for a corresponding increase in student engagement or employment outcomes helps showcase collaboration with departments, encouraging others to get involved.
Tracking particular groups helps make sure they are taking advantage of the facilities available to them, for example mature students or students from Widening Participation (WP)
34 00 Graduate Recruiter |
www.agr.org.uk
backgrounds. Looking for spikes (or dips) in engagement helps assess the impact of a new marketing activity, and year on year trends show on-going progress. Of course having the data to hand (perhaps on a simple information dashboard) gives the head of service confidence that the department is operating efficiently, especially if the dashboard links to the KPIs that drive the senior team’s decisions.
But what about the impact? How useful would it be to know which of the many initiatives you could focus on to offer the greatest benefit to your students when you are allocating resources? How would this information help with your next business case to request additional funding?
Linking student engagement metrics to DLHE outcomes (aggregating the results to preserve student anonymity) provides a starting point. Do students who engage with the careers service in their first year tend to end up in graduate level jobs more often? What about those who do placements, or who volunteer, or who have a mentor?
Using your data to help employers Graduate recruiters must make difficult decisions about which campuses to focus on. Offering data to support these decisions is a good way to promote your institution to the employers with whom you want to engage. Data showing student numbers broken down by course, home / EU / international mix, entry tariffs, and proportion achieving a 2:1 can help employers understand the type of candidates they might meet. Diversity data demonstrates the breadth of your student cohort. A selection of engagement statistics will illustrate how they use the careers service, and a summary of DLHE outcomes shows where they go.
Socio-economic background is particularly interesting. The AGR Graduate Recruitment’s 2014 Summer Survey highlighted employer interest in socio-economic diversity: half of the respondents have initiatives in place to increase socio-economic diversity, or were planning to launch initiatives in 2015. Most universities collect good data on the makeup of the student population as part of their Access Agreement. How valuable could this information be to employers that focus on this area? n
www.graduate-transitions.co.uk
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