Course page careers information via the Pathways Graduate tool

The Pathways Graduate tool from Float is a new feature for our course pages to improve the quality of careers information for our applicants.

We know that our applicants value accurate information so that they can make informed decisions about their future. This is why we want our careers information to be as clear as possible.

The information shown is from the results from the surveys below. No survey is completely accurate, as not all graduates respond. There are many factors that can affect what a graduate does, and earns, after university.

Pathways Graduate by Float

The feature displays information around graduate occupations and salary ranges.

The data used to generate these displays is from multiple reputable sources. 

These include:

• Graduate destination data from Graduate Outcomes Survey
• Occupation data from Office for National Statistics
• Careers details from National Careers Service
• Skills data from O*NET OnLine
• Higher education student uptake data from Jisc
• Employment prospects data from Working Futures
• 5 year salary data from LEO

Visitors to the pages can switch between University of Dundee and UK national results for similar courses. This allows visitors to view information from a larger sample size.

In the event that the University of Dundee data sample is too small, the tool will use national data instead.

Graduate Outcomes survey

The Graduate Outcomes (GO) survey collects information from students 15 months after they finish their course.

It asks them:

• what they are currently doing
• how much they are earning
• and their perceptions of work following their graduation from their course

This survey is undertaken by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA).

Common Aggregation Hierarchy (CAH)

As the GO survey is a survey for all UK Higher Education providers, there needs to be a way to compare courses at different universities.

HESA use the "Common Aggregation Hierarchy" to simplify the number of subjects available.

For example:

• University of Dundee offers a course in "Scottish Historical Studies"
• University of Manchester offers a course in "Ancient History"
• Both offer a course called "History" although Manchester is a "BA" and Dundee is an "MA Hons"

CAH considers all these courses "History" allowing a direct comparison between the four.

Standard Occupational Classification (SOC)

Job titles are categorised using the Standard Occupational Classification. This is from the Office for National Statistics and was last updated in 2020 (CAH2020).

The job categories you see cover thousands of job titles for the UK, although they sometimes hide nuance.

An example here is the job of advocate in Scottish law. It is part of the SOC category "barristers and judges" as it is a comparable job to a barrister in England.

This means a graduate who becomes an advocate would appear under "barristers and judges", even though there is no such job as a barrister in Scotland.

Further information from DiscoverUni

DiscoverUni is a website from HESA that uses many of the same datasets used by Pathways Graduate. It also shows information from the National Student Survey (NSS) and others.

• University of Dundee courses on DiscoverUni

You can use DiscoverUni to view even more information from surveys and graduates of our courses. It also allows you to compare our courses to those from other Universities.

You may be interested to read their about our data page. It explains many of these surveys in greater detail.