Graduate Career Explorer
How a Unique Careers Tool Developed by the University of Huddersfield and Lightcast is Transforming Lives.
At the heart of the University of Huddersfield’s ethos is a strong emphasis on accessible learning, employer engagement and impactful research. The University is committed to transforming lives and delivering successful professional career outcomes for its students – including significant numbers who come from less advantaged backgrounds.
This ambition is matched by actions, with the University currently holding a Gold rating for both student experience and student outcomes in the UK Office for Students’ Teaching Excellence Framework. More recently, the University has shown its commitment to improving its students' outcomes even more by partnering with Lightcast to develop a custom-built dashboard – Graduate Career Explorer.
See how Lightcast partnered with the University of Huddersfield to build Graduate Career Explorer.
How could the University of Huddersfield help students see the connection between their degree and potential career opportunities?
As an institution that welcomes students from a wide range of backgrounds, the University of Huddersfield recognised a persistent challenge: students often struggled to connect their degrees to real-world career opportunities, particularly in their area. With traditional careers resources falling short of providing clear, accessible insights on local and regional employment options, the University wanted to go beyond generic answers to provide students with data-driven careers insights that could answer the following sorts of questions:
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What jobs can I do with my degree?
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Where are these jobs located?
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What kind of salary can I earn?
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Which employers are hiring these jobs?
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What skills are they looking for?
In addition, the University wanted to make sure the solution for answering these questions was simple and intuitive, so that all students – including those not particularly used to using data – could benefit.
A custom-built dashboard using labor market insights to connect students' courses to local and national job opportunities.
The University already had an established partnership with Lightcast – the world-leading authority on labor market analytics – with data being embedded across the institution to inform activities such as course design and portfolio planning. While using this data, the University’s Senior Planning Analyst, Ben Hull, soon saw its potential in another key area of the mission to inspire global professionals: bringing careers insights to students.
"When Lightcast data was brought into the University, I immediately recognized its power and the potential to democratize it by making it accessible to students. With this vision, we worked in collaboration with Lightcast to develop Graduate Career Explorer – a custom dashboard using detailed labor market insights to connect degrees to actual careers. So far as I know, this is unique in the world of higher education careers information."
Ben Hull, Senior Planning Analyst, University of Huddersfield
Graduate Career Explorer is a bespoke, interactive dashboard that connects the degree a student is doing to the real-world job market data. Offering students a highly personalised, intuitive user experience, the tool empowers users to make informed decisions about their futures by enabling them to:
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Explore career options linked directly to their course.
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Understand where these jobs are in their area or across the nation.
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View detailed insights on salaries, skills, and job postings.
According to Bob Gilworth, Senior Lecturer in Careers Guidance, in the School of Education, these are exactly the sorts of things students say they are looking for in career-readiness surveys:
"Career-readiness surveys show that students want to understand how their degree fits the job market, and what opportunities are out there for them. Whether they want to search by location, sector, or skills, Graduate Career Explorer answers this need by exploring the possibilities from all these different angles."
The importance of getting genuine buy-in and engagement across the institution.
Moving from Ben Hull’s original vision for a student-facing dashboard, to the finished product that is now transforming students’ lives, required strong instiutional enagement. The aim wasn’t simply to have a careers tool that only the careers team used or knew about, but a tool that the whole institution could get excited about, given its potential to improve the employability of students.
The Institutional Project Lead, Dave Stanbury — Deputy Head of Careers and Employability — led the way in getting buy-in across the University from an early stage. Working alongside multiple stakeholders — from Careers Consultants to Course Leaders, and from Senior Staff to Data Analysts — Dave and his team encouraged constant input and feedback from across the University, including user-testing by students, in order to develop a tool that could really engage and empower stakeholders and students across the institution.
“Engaging with multiple stakeholders across the University from the outset has been key to the success we're seeing with Graduate Career Explorer. The process was highly creative and genuinely collaborative, with ideas being constantly developed, challenged, and refined by input from multiple stakeholders. We're genuinely excited by the engagement we're now seeing, and that we've ended up with the only careers tool that I've heard students describe as 'cool.'"
A partnership between a genuinely forward-thinking university and a truly world-leading provider of workforce data.
Graduate Career Explorer is the result of a deeply collaborative process between the University of Huddersfield and Lightcast, with the institution mapping its courses to careers, and Lightcast developing the dashboard and supplying the data that powers it.
A great example of this collaboration is the taxonomy upon which it is built. To begin with, the University used the UK’s official Standard Occupation Classification (SOC) taxonomy, but soon found this to be limiting, given that it is only updated every ten years. The solution was to use the Lightcast Occupation Taxonomy. Not only is this updated much more regularly than the government taxonomy, therefore taking labor market changes into account, but it is also far more granular, with more than 1,800 occupations compared to 412 in the official classification.
The University also partnered with Lightcast’s Data Science team in Milan to develop a truly custom-built experience, with an intuitive design that makes complex labor market insights easily digestible for students. Professor Tim Thornton, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, is thrilled about what has been accomplished:
“Bringing together experts in employability, data, and technology, both from within the University and from our partners at Lightcast, has been genuinely exciting. Their technical excellence has made this a standout project, which is already receiving external recognition.”
Universally positive feedback from students and careers advisors for Graduate Career Explorer.
Since its launch, feedback from staff, students, and parents has been overwhelmingly positive. For students – especially those with constraints around travel or relocation – the geographical mapping features are especially powerful. David Redrum, a Senior Lecturer explains:
“Many of my students come from very tight-knit communities where there's sometimes a bit of pressure not to leave. To be able to show them that these careers are available to them on their doorstep has been really empowering. I genuinely believe that it's already changed quite a few lives.”
The feedback from careers advisors has been glowing:
“The first thing students always say when they start using Graduate Career Explorer is ‘Wow this is amazing.’ They’ve never even thought about all this information before. Suddenly everything they could possibly need to know is right there in front of them in this one platform. It is an absolute game-changer in terms of careers education.”