The Graduate Outcomes (GO) survey is the biggest UK annual social survey and captures the perspectives and current status of recent graduates.
All graduates who completed a higher education course in the UK after August 2017 will be asked to take part in the survey 15 months after they finish their studies. The survey aims to help current and future students gain an insight into career destinations and development.
The Graduate Outcomes survey needs to meet ambitious response rate targets to ensure we have sufficiently detailed data that is usable for a range of information and regulatory purposes. Each member of staff has a role to play. You can help by telling your Final Year students to look out for the GO survey and by assisting the Careers and Employability Service in phoning graduates a few weeks before the Survey to encourage them to complete it.
The University has a number of different communication tools available to colleagues to help promote the survey – the toolkit can be found on the university Graduate Outcomes Sharepoint site or contact Joy Nixon for more information
To promote our graduate support package, please click here.
Click here to see the dedicated webpage for alumni.
Data from the GO survey is used by the Office for Students (OfS) as a measure of the effectiveness of our Access and Participation Plan (APP) and is a key part of the TEF metrics. The results are used by various league table compilers including the Times Good University Guide.
The GO survey replaced the Destination of Leavers from Higher Education (DLHE) survey as the official means of measuring the employment and study outcomes of HE students at UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in 2017.
Although GO shares features in common with DLHE, the timing, methodology and process are markedly different. Most notably, instead of recording what respondents are doing 6 months after leaving university, GO records activity 15 months after graduation. GO therefore represents significant discontinuity in the collection and measurement of graduate outcomes information. Consequently, GO results cannot be equated with DLHE results. This is reinforced by HESA who are releasing the first set of results as ‘experimental’ statistics in 2020. These differences are explained further here.
There are a number of core questions that all graduates are being asked. These range from questions about current status to whether they think they are on track in their career.
Graduates are grouped into four cohorts based on the end date of their course. Depending on when their course ended, they receive their survey invitation around 15 months later. For example, if their course ended in August to October 2018, they receive the survey in December 2019.
Graduate Outcomes data will be used for a range of information and regulatory purposes. GO data informs School Enterprise and Employability Plans (SEEPS). The data is used in accordance with the privacy notice (read more about privacy)
Find out more here.