Tamás Horváth: Central system for tracking graduates’ careers
There is a large number of higher education development strategies, both on EU and domestic
level, which aim to tighten the connection between higher education and the labour market.
This appears to be a particularly important goal in emerging countries which saw major social
and economic structural changes in the past decades. As a result of these changes, higher
education supply does not seem to adequately respond to changes in the labour market, nor to
the demands or expectations it raises. One reason for this is inadequate information flow
between the two areas. One efficient way to bridge this, as international experience shows, is
tracking the careers of university and college graduates.
The career tracking of graduates implies empirical data collection (mainly via
questionnaire-based surveys and – to a lesser degree – in-depth interviews and focus groups)
among those who have obtained higher education diploma at an institution of tertiary
education recognised by the state. The aim of such data collection is to gather information on
the graduates‘ professional advancement, their success in the labour market, as well as
exploring their views on the training they had participated in. Institutional surveys among
graduates seek to gain information for the purpose of improving and developing training at
the institution, as well as for strengthening the alumni network. Professional organisations,
research institutes and state bodies carry out data collection in order to explore labour market
and employment trends on national, regional and sectoral levels, which help setting training
priorities, as well as better adjusting training and labour market demands.
Following the career of graduates provides useful information for a wide range of
actors of higher education. For universities and colleges, such research provides invaluable
feedback on the employment situation, labour market characteristics of their graduates, as
well as on the applicability of their knowledge and their intentions at further training, which
may help improve training and services. The graduates‘ success in finding employment and
its factors carry important information for future graduates with respect to their career
orientation or for those who are already at the stage of choosing a particular institution or
major. The transition to the two-cycle Bologna system presents a unique situation in this
respect in that a large proportion of graduates with bachelors’ degrees (BA) are potential
applicants as well, therefore both career tracking and information provision for applicants
may have several interrelated layers. Data on graduates are also crucial for governmental and
sectoral actors in their efforts to design training supply. Last but not least, career tracking
provides useful information for actors of the labour market on the training provided at higher
education institutions.
These wide ranging benefits are part of the reason why career tracking has a prominent
place in the New Hungary Development Plan (Új Magyarország Fejlesztési Terv) and within
that, the Social Renewal Operative Programme (a Társadalmi Megújulás Operatív Program,
TÁMOP). The goal, on the one hand, is to see this activity – as a kind of a service – spread as
widely as possible among higher education institutions and, on the other hand, to ensure the
professional basis and high level of career tracking based on international and Hungarian
practice. The designers of the programme believe that adopting an adequate practice may
greatly enhance the competitiveness of institutions and contribute to the quality-driven
development of Hungarian higher education.
The 2005 Higher Education Act stipulates that every university and college is obliged
to carry out career tracking, however, we have witnessed only few, sporadic examples of such
activity, mainly as spontaneous initiatives of the institutions. Beside sectoral interests, the
development of central and institutional systems of career tracking is justified by the fact that
the current practice of career tracking in Hungary is still rife with many internal weaknesses.
Often this can be put down to the absence of adequate professional background to, and
sustainable institutional model of, career tracking. As a result of this, there is only scarce
evidence of professionally and methodologically well-founded institutional career tracking
systems with secure financing, there are only few well-working alumni programmes, in
addition, graduates are only loosely tied to their educational institutions after graduation,
therefore their response rate lags behind, not to mention the inadequate integration of career
tracking both from an organisational, as well as IT point of view.
The TÁMOP Programme No. 4.1.3. titled „Systematic development of higher
education services“, together with its institutional tender component, TÁMOP 4.1.1., seek to
tackle these shortages. The programme aims to provide central services and professional
support for institutions to carry out career tracking with financial support from grants. The
central career tracking programme therefore is not a national, centrally controlled, statistical
survey but should be seen primarily as a professional development programme aiming to
support institutional career tracking by creating the basis for their long term operation. To this
end, consideration had to be given to the strengths and weaknesses when elaborating the
central and institutional programmes. Drawing on a thorough and multi-layered stock-taking,
a central programme may allow the elaboration of an efficient and methodologically well-
founded institutional model; the integration of the graduates‘ data with other, labour-related
databases; as well as increasing the acceptance and prestige of career tracking through intense
dissemination activity. The strength of institutional career tracking, in turn, lies in the fact that
– building on the graduates‘ ties to their former institutions as a result of alumni activity –
institutions are able to establish direct contact with their graduates, while they can also
formulate their demands as to information about their graduates.
In light of the above, the career-tracking programme carried out under TÁMOP 4.1.3. has a
two-fold purpose. On the one hand, it seeks to elaborate a comprehensive and sustainable
model of career tracking and provide support for the institutional projects and developments.
Stages of the elaboration of the DPR institutional model
Stock-taking
International good practices
(OECD and other countries)
Elaboration
of an institutional model
of career tracking (DPR)
Manual,
process management
Monitoring of
institutional
career tracking
Training, helpdesk
Domestic practices
International
and domestic literature
Needs assessment of
every higher education
institution
Empirical studies
(national and pilot
surveys)
Specification
of SROP Tender 4.1.1.
for institutions
• Database of information
and knowledge
• Good practices
• Case studies
• Conference
• Publications
Professional support
for institutional
programmes
„Audited”
institutional career
tracking system
based on unified
methodology
Monitoring,
assessment
Beside the key research and methodological questions, the recommended institutional model
address two other important pillars: the necessary organisational background of career
tracking studies and their embeddedness within the institution on the one hand, which include
questions of professional competence, the direct returns form career tracking and the
appearance of some of its element in strategies and development plans, data protection, and
the IT background. On the other hand, internal and external communication and of the career
tracking programme and its form is crucial in order to convey the results to all stakeholders.
The horizontal goal of the institutional model, that is, the goal that is set for every activity of
the programme are ensuring sustainability, including financial (sale and sponsorship),
institutional-organisational (feedback, regulation) and personal-professional aspects (human
resources, necessary professional competences).
A further goal of the central career tracking system is to provide a service which has long
been missing from the higher education sector: supplying up-to-date and wide-ranging
information on the trajectories of graduates through the integration of central databases. The
programme allows comparison between higher education institutions with respect to their
labour market output, which may greatly contribute to the quality development of higher
education and increasing the competitiveness of the institutions involved. This is made
possible by the integration of the Higher Education Information System (Felsőoktatási
Információs Rendszer, FIR) and other, labour related databases containing information on
graduates’ employment characteristics (type and location of the workplace, job, income), in
line with data protection regulations. Beside systematic monitoring, institution-based career
tracking, if accompanied by a one-time professional and technological development, can
regularly provide datasets for institutions on the employment and labour market experience of
the graduates. It is important to emphasize that we do not talk of personal data here but
statistical aggregates, therefore the central DPR database so established will provide
information on institutions, faculties or even majors and not the labour market characteristics
of individual graduates.
An additional goal of the central graduate career tracking programme is closely linked
to the abovementioned ones: it seeks to ensure that a wide range of information is collected
for actors of higher education on completing a degree, finding employment and careers, which
is made available for those interested. This necessitates technology and informatics
background to ensure information flow between the central and institutional systems.