The Challenge of Improving Your Students' Employability.
Whether it be from the OfS with the TEF and the Graduate Outcomes Survey, guidance from the QAA in the Quality Code, or from demand from students themselves, pressure is increasing on universities to improve their students' employability. Our aim is to help you better understand employer demand for graduate occupations and skills, so that you can assess how well your portfolio and courses are aligned with employment prospects.
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How Can we Help?
The Office for Students' third strategic priority states that, “We need to be sure that universities and colleges are doing all they can to secure positive outcomes for their students not just when they graduate but for years into a profoundly uncertain future”.
Through our unparalleled Labour Market Insight, which provides 9-year projections, delivered through easy-to-use tools, we are helping universities across the country achieve this, by giving them the understanding they need to plan a portfolio and validate courses against employer demand for associated skills. Check out our 3-step guide to find out more.
How Can Our Data Solve Your Challenges?
The level of detail in our Labour Market Insight (LMI) allows you to identify the specific skills valued by the labour markets your portfolio and courses are oriented towards. This means that whether you have responsibility for portfolio planning in your particular academic area, or are involved in providing market insight to support requests for new provision, our insight can help you.
Portfolio Planning
We can map your courses to related occupations, or map them to skills and then to the most relevant occupations. By plugging this into our detailed LMI, we can help you understand where your university's portfolio may be misaligned with employer demand in relevant labour markets and highlight potential opportunities to create new programmes to meet market demand.
Course Design
Our interlinking of different datasets uncovers where skills are in demand in terms of jobs, the industries which are hiring for those jobs, and how that differs across the country. This means courses can be delivered and assessed in a way that emphasises contexts which are evidence-based in terms of their impact on employability from case study choices, to placements and assessment setting.
Skills Demand
Through our Job Postings Analytics and Profile Analytics, we provide both current and longitudinal insights into demand for hard and soft skills, as well as the ability to compare the skills that are valued by professionals with the skills demanded by employers. All of this provides highly useful evidence for informed interventions and activities by Employability and Careers teams.
How Do We Deliver Our Labour Market Insight to You?
Analyst
Our online data tool, Analyst, is an easy-to-use platform that gives you instant access to key intelligence on jobs, skills and industries, at all geographical levels including national, Government Office Region, LEP and even Local Authority. Tapping into our unique collection of multiple data sources, and Job Postings Analytics, Analyst enables you to assess your portfolio against employment trends, and to identify job and skills demand for individual course areas so that you can build a build a business case for new provision.
Consulting
We understand that unique challenges require unique solutions. By working with you to discuss the specific questions you need answering, we can offer you a fully customisable consulting experience that can help you in any of the following areas: horizon scanning; mapping your courses to associated labour market demand; establishing areas of undersupply and oversupply; and identifying potential opportunities for the creation of new courses where demand for graduate jobs and skills is currently not being adequately met.
API
Our dataset can also be accessed through APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). These give you complete flexibility to use the data throughout your university in a number of ways, including integration into your Business Intelligence tools and CRMs, and creating a management dashboard to monitor labour market trends and projections in sectors and geographies that are of interest. We also have APIs tailored for use in student-facing environments - check out how Purdue University in Indiana are using this.
Let's Talk
We'd love to hear about how you are approaching portfolio planning, course design, and skills demand with a view to improving the employability of your students. Contact us and we will:
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Listen
We'll listen as you tell us how you are currently trying to meet this challenge, and the difficulties you face.
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Discuss
We'll show you how our solutions can help you, whether in more strategic portfolio planning or individual course design.
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Deliver
We'll help you use our solution to take an evidence-based approach to improving your students'employabilty.
By Working With Us You Will Have…
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The ability to identify how well your portfolio and courses are aligned with demand for graduate employment.
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Confidence that courses are vetted using robust data to establish demand for associated skills and jobs.
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A reputation as an institution that strives to ensure its students are given the best chance of gaining sustainable employment.
Other Challenges we are Helping Universities With
We are currently working with universities across the country, providing solutions on a number of other challenges. Click on the appropriate box below to find out more.
