In today’s rapidly changing education landscape, universities are increasingly relying on data-driven insights to influence their strategies and planning. With this in mind, having platforms like Discover Graduate Outcomes (DGO) offers a wealth of information to institutions looking to understand the complexities of graduate outcomes and employment trends.
DGO equips institutions with a comprehensive data dashboard, allowing them to compare and benchmark data from their institution with other universities and the broader sector. Drawing from the Graduate Outcomes survey data, provided by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), DGO provides a greater understanding of the graduate labour market to universities.
To give you further insight into this data dashboard, we spoke with Ryan, Performance and Intelligence Partner at the University of South Wales. In his (recently introduced) role, he supports academic subject areas and professionals by providing timely, credible intelligence and specialist advice to help support the University’s 2030 strategy. Building on this, he is involved in turning data into actionable insight and translating complex analysis for key stakeholders to influence change. This includes the use of external metrics to identify areas for improvement; which is where DGO comes in.
Ryan shares details of the challenges his University faced around graduate data and how the DGO dashboard helped overcome these challenges.
Enhancement of Internal Reporting
In 2022, the ownership of their graduate outcomes data switched to Ryan’s team at the University. Because of this, they conducted a thorough review of their current data and what they were able to report on, utilising DGO. They were able to sense check and validate their internal data to make sure the figures matched up and improve their quality assurance, as a result. As Ryan puts…
“The dashboards provided great assistance in this process and enhanced the level and quality of data we now are able to provide across the institution. Data such as employment type, employment basis, employment location, all now form a key element of our Graduate Outcomes reporting internally, feeding into a range of processes, such as subject area reviews, faculty performance reviews and headline data for the institution.”
Interestingly here, he mentions that the DGO dashboard was used to supplement their existing data, develop this data further and they used it to impact their processes. DGO can be utilised as a stand-alone dashboard, but in this setting, it has been used to fulfil some gaps in their processes, showing its versatility. Building off this point, he mentions…
“While we report on Positive Outcomes as the key initial metric, our data now gives much further and in far more detail, mirroring the dashboards, just at a lower level in line with our internal subject area and faculty structures. This gives insights which can be benchmarked against the sector and drives awareness, understanding, and improvements in performance.”
Again, highlighting how they have used this tool to enhance their current data. In this instance, utilising it to enhance their understanding of their key metric indicator at a granular level, by looking at subjects and faculty data.
Benchmarking across the sector
Comparing data across different universities and the wider sector is vital to universities, so that they can better understand how they are performing, what they are doing well, and areas for improvement. This in turn can impact where a university focuses time, resource and budget, so it’s very important that a university can do this. In this instance, Ryan talks about how he used DGO to compare data across the industry…
“One of the most important exercises we use the dashboards for is being able to compare our performance against a range of other institutions in the University Alliance, competition groups, or geographical locations. In addition to sector benchmarking, we are able to see, not only our own trend data, but that of other institutions, which gives really good insights for us.”
Building on this, he adds…
“Each can tell its own story which is why we place great importance of benchmarking as an activity.”
This is a really valid point. Benchmarking can give you a huge amount of information with various stories. For the University, they were comparing population size, demographics, curriculum offerings and more with different types of institutions. So, it is important to have an external tool which allows comparisons to be made easily and be extremely clear to the user, especially as part of Ryan’s role was to explain this information to key stakeholders across the University.
Changing conversations in the industry
“The data included in the dashboards has changed and enhanced our own internal reporting. As a result, the conversations we are having internally are more detailed, insightful and data driven, giving far more detail to careers and academics colleagues about employment location, types of employment, job quality measures and whether the course of study was a requirement for employment being just a few examples.”
For any decision-making in universities, you need to have the key metrics and evidence to back-up conversations. Adding to this, to have these conversations, you also need to have data that is easy to understand for the people listening. In this instance, it’s great to see how Ryan has utilised DGO to have these conversations with stakeholders across the University and to get their buy-in. Additionally, he mentions…
“…opening up conversations with others across the sector.”
It’s a nice thought. Universities can often find themselves siloed from each other, which can negatively impact the industry. Having further opportunities for collaboration and innovation, can not only benefit individual universities, but the wider sector. A lot of universities can struggle with similar issues and having these opportunities to work together can help overcome these challenges.
Final comments
We couldn’t end without getting Ryan’s final views on DGO…
“Discover Graduate Outcomes is a great tool, giving great depth to insights and intelligence from the survey to inform internal thinking. Given the level of detail and type of data provided it really can provide a level of insight to inform decision making across the institution. The type of data provided, if used correctly encourages engagement and discussion between a wide range of departments and teams across the institution, both academic and from a professional services area.”
Overall, Ryan provides an excellent insight into the challenges higher education institutions face and how using DGO has helped to improve current data processes, allowed data comparison and improved conversations within institutions themselves, as well as with the wider sector.
To find out more about Discover Graduate Outcomes head to our website and if you’re keen to see the dashboard in action, join our next online demonstration on the 24 July.