In this section:Employability
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EmployabilityDo you know the employment outcomes of your graduates?There are major differences between bioscience disciplines and between universities in the proportions of graduates going on to take higher degrees, going into discipline-related employment or into employment not directly related to the discipline they studied. Staff should be aware of the employment destinations of the graduates in their subject. HE Careers Services are usually willing to supply first and sometimes longitudinal destination information for their own graduates to academic departments. Some Services and academic departments make it available on their web sites for the benefit of current and prospective students. See, for example, the following web pages: Careers services may also have copies of published reports of studies and surveys of graduate initial destinations and career pathways. The most significant sources of information are as follows:
Surveys of initial destinations – all or multiple subjectsThe Centre for BioscienceFirst destination information, culled from HESA and other data donated by individual universities, for the UK Centre for Bioscience subjects agriculture, anatomy and physiology, biochemistry, food science and technology, genetics, microbiology, pharmacology and zoology. AllWhat do PhD's do? A survey of the destinations of UK PhD students HESA HEFCE (Go to: 2002/52
and Annexes and Table E8) Career tracking surveys – single or multiple subjectsVery few longitudinal employment surveys of bioscientists per se have been carried out. However, two important surveys have tracked the career progress of graduates divided into a number of subject groupings including "Natural Sciences". Summaries of the relevant reports, "Working Out" and "Moving On" which follow the career progress of a set graduates over 1.5 and 3.4 years respectively. Results from research following the further progress of the same graduates over 7 years can be found at the Institute for Employment Research (Seven years on: graduates in the changing labour market). LMI4HE produced a Briefing Paper, "What Do Biological Sciences Graduates Do?", which describes the career patterns of 209 graduates from 5 HEIs in the North West region who qualified from 1990 to 1997. Their career progress for up to 7 years was tracked, focusing on employment sectors, employer size, self-employment, further qualifications and other factors. A report, "The English Degree and Graduate Careers" (Brennan, Williams and Blasko), published by the English Subject Centre, looks at the career destinations of graduates in English focuses also on biological science graduates as a comparator group. Presented data derives from the HESA First Destination survey and from a recent study by CHERI of graduate employment for up to 3.5 years after graduation in 11 European countries and Japan.
Information about career destinations – single subjectsA comprehensive list of web sites offering information about bioscience careers is given on the careers information page of our website What Do Graduates Do? presents the figures from the Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education survey, conducted by HESA.
Maintaining awareness of the market for your graduatesClearly, graduate destination surveys provide a valuable historical picture of the market for graduates but are not a sure guide to future demand. Campus careers services are in constant touch with employers and will always respond if asked for an appraisal of current trends and developments. Beyond this there are sources of information enabling staff to maintain awareness of the graduate market. Note particularly the publications and web resources of:
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