Graduation success and 10% boost in graduate outcomes cause for double celebration
By Dr Stephen Boyd, Director of Careers and Employability at Manchester Metropolitan University
As we reflect on another successful round of Manchester Met graduations, we’re delighted to also celebrate our impressive 10% boost of graduate outcome results over two years – the number of our students entering graduate level jobs.
This is fantastic news, showing we’re bucking the employability trend and proving we’re giving our students the tools to succeed in their future careers.
It seems external organisations agree. From the numerous employability awards we’ve won lately to our links with industry and strong student placement opportunities, we’re recognised as a university that supports our students to aim high and thrive.
Over the past two weeks we have celebrated the graduations of 14,200 students in Manchester Metropolitan’s Class of 2023. We know many will go on to excel in their chosen fields and we look forward to hearing about their successes, with the knowledge that we have played an important role in setting them up for a bright future.
What our students do when they leave us matters as much as what they do when they’re with us.
This week Universities UK has released compelling new data that reveals 73% of UK graduates credit going to university with enabling them to find the job they wanted. Almost two-thirds (64%) say that going to university has improved their job security, while 78% say the support they received at university helped them gain employment.
That’s why, from day one of their university career to well after their graduation, we are passionate about giving our students the tools to flourish in their chosen careers.
Building employability is woven throughout our students’ journey with us. We work hard to help them learn career-enhancing skills as part of their studies and to give them development opportunities far beyond the lecture theatre.
As we embarked on this year’s graduations, we learned that our graduate outcome results, which capture how many students are entering graduate level jobs, have increased by more than 10% over the past two years. With a rise this year alone of 6.7% the data exceeded even our best expectations. As the average increase for other UK institutions was a more modest 3%, we’re bucking the employability trend.
Before delving into the whys and wherefores of such a big leap, a recap on what these figures mean. The Graduate Outcomes Key Performance Indicator (referred to as the Graduate Outcomes ‘Prospect Score’) looks at the percentage of UK full-time first-degree students who have secured a graduate level job 15 months after leaving us.
The Graduate Outcomes Survey is the largest social survey in the UK, second only in scale to the National Census. Putting our figures into context, an incredible 92% of our graduates in the survey are in what are described as ‘positive outcomes’ across all career pathways including self-employment, and in this latest data 78.7% are in graduate-level work/study (our Graduate Outcomes Prospects Score) – a remarkable improvement when we consider a couple of years ago Manchester Met’s prospect score was 68.6%.
In practice, almost 80% of our graduates enter careers that demand an undergraduate degree. Think teachers, nurses, solicitors, digital and creative specialists, scientists and other degree-level professional roles or training.
How did we achieve this improvement? Several factors are key, from our work with employers to secure high quality placements, to making our learning more employability-focussed, but the real catalyst for change has been a deep university-wide cultural shift.
Three years ago, we prioritised enhancing graduate outcomes, making the entire Manchester Met experience - from day one until several years after graduation - employability enriched. There’s no quick fix. It’s about who we are, our culture, and what we value in our educational experience.
Our Graduate Outcomes Strategy is central. It sets out a clear vision, delivery themes and targets. Our ambition is that every student should have the opportunity to gain experiences that enable them to realise their potential and to develop skills and personal attributes that make them highly employable. We want them to leave us with the right skills and a credible career plan for a successful future.
That’s been our enduring point of reference ever since, and it applies across every academic department, with a tailored yet laser-focussed approach, ensuring career-thinking and career-confidence are now core elements of our curriculum. Whether through Rise, our award-winning initiative to enable students to earn credits for gaining employability skills, or Future Me, a programme of coordinated events to help students to explore career skills, we encourage students to make the most of every career-enhancing opportunity.
Manchester Met has long prided itself on delivering strong placement opportunities. We also know that work experience shouldn’t be feast or famine. Our work-integrated learning blends smaller bite-sized career opportunities, business challenges and live project briefs seamlessly into the curriculum. We make an ongoing commitment to deliver meaningful work experience for every student, we don’t just provide add-on 12-month placements for a select few.
Speaking of which, you can be the most diligent student, but unless you have the social and cultural capital to sell yourself to a prospective employer, your career prospects may be limited. That’s why we’ve invested in initiatives to enhance students’ communication skills, tenacity, and social wherewithal, such as interview and assessment centre training.
After training, we’ve seen first-hand the quietest, least confident students reach a place where they can walk up to a group of recruiters at a careers fair and explain why they should be hired.
All this is part of our newly launched Education Strategy which embeds real world experiential learning into all aspects of the curriculum.
As part of our Graduate Outcomes Strategy, we have also made a concerted effort to become an employer of choice for our own students and graduates – an unequivocal and powerful statement of faith in the wonderful talented, career-ready graduates we produce at Manchester Met. So far in 2023 alone we have employed 1,246 students in part-time roles at the university, and 94 recent graduates in the last two years, have now started their professional career journeys in permanent salaried roles with Manchester Met thanks to our new Professional Services career-pathway initiative.
But it’s not just what we’re doing inside the University that makes a difference. We’ve also teamed up with some of the region’s leading employers and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA), to understand how our city region can best retain local graduate talent.
We’re working with GM Mayor Andy Burnham on a project to encourage students to start their careers in Manchester rather than entering the London-centric recruitment market. Manchester is the largest graduate labour market outside London, and Manchester Met students leave us equipped and hungry for career success in fields from life sciences, to accountancy, to the creative industries. We all want them to start here.
We have also established Manchester Met-exclusive links with HR departments in all ten Greater Manchester councils to provide placements and job opportunities for our career-ready students and graduates. Instead of recruiting across the UK, they are now looking to our graduates, many of whom live within their postcodes and represent their wider communities.
Another key to our success is our support for students after they pack up their textbooks. Our dedicated Early Career Graduate Team stays in touch during the crucial time just after university. The specialist six-strong team advises, coaches and supports graduates as well as sharing proactive, externally sourced employer opportunities.
We see this as a duty of care. It differentiates us from many others in the sector and reflects our commitment to our students’ futures.
The cherry on top of our recent graduate outcomes success is the sector recognition we have received this year at national and international employability awards:
Best Student Program for our Rise initiative at the Global Career Services Summit,
Best University Employability Strategy at the Target jobs Awards
Outstanding University Partnership with an Employer at the Institute of Student Employers’ Awards.
Collaborating with so many colleagues across the whole university and being able to celebrate their success, hard work, creativity and innovation has been brilliant, and shows just how much we’re now recognised for excellence in graduate careers.
We’ve set the bar high, and I can’t wait to see what we’ll have achieved for our graduates in another two years. For now, we wish our Class of 2023 every success and we are here for them as they take their first steps on the path to rewarding and enriching careers.
