GCCA | Graduate Careers Council of Australia

Graduate Careers Australia

ergo - Number 92 September 2003

Australian Universities Quality Forum (AUQF)

The Graduate Careers Council of Australia (GCCA) recently presented a paper at the Australian Universities Quality Forum (AUQF), held in Melbourne on the 11-13 June 2003. The Forum was based on the theme ‘National Quality in a Global Context’ and followed on from the success of the inaugural event held in Brisbane in 2002.

The Forum attracted an audience of senior executives with the primary responsibility for quality assurance, chairpersons of Academic Boards, university staff working in the area of quality assurance and improvement, and interested government agencies.

The GCCA’s Research Manager Bruce Guthrie’s presentation focused on national issues with a paper entitled ‘Communicating with Recent Graduates: Making Sense of the Graduate Destination Survey’ which summarised the process and issues involved in gathering graduate destination data.

The Graduate Destination Survey (GDS), with the Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) or Postgraduate Research Experience Questionnaire (PREQ), is sent to all new Australian university graduates every year. The purpose of the survey is to take a snapshot of what recent graduates are doing in terms of their post-graduation activities and to gather information from them about their higher education experience.

The Graduate Careers Council of Australia coordinates the collection, processing and return of data to institutions prior to national reporting. The data files are used within institutions for course and careers advice, institutional planning and quality assessment. Many people, beyond those who originally collected the data, are making use of the information gathered.

Data from the most recent survey is available free from GradsOnline, accessible from www.gradsonline.edu.au . For further information contact the gradlink Helpdesk on (03) 9349 4300 or [email protected] .