This autumn, the career monitoring survey was sent to all graduates who completed a master’s degree, a Bachelor of Science (Pharmacy) degree or a kindergarten teacher degree in 2015 as well as to doctoral graduates from 2017. If you belong to this year’s respondent group, you have already been informed and sent instructions by text message, post or email.
1. Help students understand the employment opportunities available after graduation
Career monitoring data are important to the career considerations of both prospective and current university students. Even though it does not provide any concrete answers regarding what students or applicants should do, this information is a valuable tool for reflecting on one’s choices. In what kind of positions have earlier graduates found employment? Which factors were important to them in finding a job? What kind of knowledge and skills should students develop during their studies from the point of view of their professional career? No other source provides information on these matters in as comprehensive a manner as the survey.
Career monitoring data are used by, among others, the national Töissä.fi service which has been praised by final year students and guidance counsellors in upper secondary schools. Users of the Töissä.fi service are also advised to take advantage of the Urapolulla.fi service (in Finnish only), which offers a range of exercises that are useful in considering one’s career opportunities.
2. Your responses help develop teaching and education
One of the goals of the extensive degree programme reform carried out at the University of Helsinki in autumn 2017 is to enhance employer contacts in education and to better prepare students for finding work. Career monitoring data have been and are being used to develop education and teaching.
Osaamistutka (‘Skills radar’), an application developed by Tuukka Kangas, has been especially popular, as it makes it possible to independently analyse the significance of individual sets of skills in professional life – and consider these expectations in relation to graduates’ notions of the skills they have developed through their studies.
3. Professional life is changing – Which skills are in demand?
The transformation of work is a hot topic, one that can only be understood by monitoring, analysing and studying it. The results of the career monitoring survey will be thoroughly analysed, as well as processed by the faculties, degree programmes and doctoral schools. As well as developing the content of education, the results will be utilised, among other things, in career guidance activities and on courses supporting career planning.
Among the most important career skills according to graduates from the University of Helsinki are self-direction and initiative, the ability to learn new things, problem-solving skills, information retrieval skills, communication and analytical thinking.
Skills required in professional life that were not sufficiently learnt included stress tolerance, cooperation skills, organisation skills, public speaking skills, project management and negotiation skills.
In addition to these three good reasons to complete the survey, there is a fourth one: the responses gained in this survey will affect the University’s funding from 2021 onwards.
The career monitoring survey will close at the mid-December
Read the results of the previous career monitoring surveys
- University of Helsinki career monitoring reports
- National career monitoring reports
- Töissä.fi service, utilising career monitoring data
- Urapolulla.fi service (in Finnish only), supporting career planning
The survey is carried out by the Aarresaari network of university career and recruitment services.
Responses are always processed confidentially and in such a way that individual respondents cannot be identified. Career monitoring datasets are stored in anonymised digital format in the Finnish Social Science Data Archive.