The HE world may appear to be hell-bound in a handbasket, but the employability of Australian graduates isn’t.
The 2023 survey of employer satisfaction reports that 90 per cent plus are satisfied both with new grads’ job-related knowledge and standards and with their foundational skills, literacy, numeracy, comms and the like.
The survey is one of the suite of measures of university performance in the Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching resources, created for the Feds by ANU’s Social Research Centre.
Overall, 80 per cent plus of employers were sufficiently satisfied with their hire that they were inclined to hire somebody else from the same course and institution.
The best discipline-based scores are for graduates working in their fields, 90 per cent for agriculture, 88 per cent for engineering.
Some 85 per cent of supervisors of education grads were satisfied with them, which may contradict Education Minister Jason Clare’s oft-stated opinion that initial teacher education courses do not prepare graduates for the classroom – unless it just reflects course completers high expectations of what they should have been taught.
One notable negative is employers scored graduates who studied online lower for collaboration. “This may need to be monitored with the increase in online and hybrid study,” says QILT strategy director Lisa Bolton.
QILT, which lost $8 million in funding in the Federal Budget, only publishes institution wide results, which is a shame as the scores that would be most useful for prospective students wanting to compare their chosen discipline.
