PayScale Launches Comprehensive Alumni Survey Pilot to Measure Career Success
Seattle, Washington (PRWEB) May 14, 2014 -- PayScale, Inc., a leader in employee compensation data, today announced the launch of its Alumni Analytics pilot program to help universities gain valuable insight into the work experiences of graduates. As part of the pilot program, PayScale will conduct an alumni survey on behalf of a handful of inaugural customers for Alumni Analytics including The University of Washington and Clarkson University. PayScale will then provide a detailed report to each school on the career outcomes of its alumni. Between the inaugural schools included in the pilot, the alumni survey will be sent to more than 188,000 college graduates.
"The efforts of PayScale and this pilot project are important steps in higher education's efforts to better understand how students are faring in the professional world,” said Paul Jenny, Vice Provost, University of Washington. “We are pleased to be a pilot partner with PayScale on this initiative."
The reports for each school will include information on alumni compensation, job satisfaction, job stress, job meaning, etc. and will drill in by gender, degree level, major, job title and various other areas as sample sizes allow.
“Our alumni network is our most valuable asset and underpins the lifetime return value of the Clarkson education for every student,” said Kelly Chezum, Vice President for External Relations, Clarkson University. “We look forward to incorporating what we learn from the PayScale project into student and alumni programs as well as adding another career-building resource for alumni to use in advancing their own personal goals.”
What makes this alumni survey different?
1. Alumni Get a Free Personalized Salary Report
Getting alumni to fill out a school’s survey can be a challenge, but PayScale can provide an immediate value proposition in the form of a salary report showing how they’re being paid comparatively to the market.
2. Alumni Anonymity
Another issue with traditional alumni surveys is that alumni are sometimes concerned that after sharing their salary data, the next call from the university might be to ask for a donation. PayScale will keep personally identifiable information separate from the results shared with schools. It’s better for alumni and better for schools – everybody wins when the sample size is larger and there’s no incentive for alumni to under- or over-report their compensation.
3. Immediate Ability to Benchmark
Surveying alumni about compensation and career data is not new, but it’s also currently not standardized. Because PayScale is leveraging its existing employee survey and has been surveying college graduates across hundreds of U.S. universities for years, we can provide the ability to compare data against similar schools right now.
“We are enthusiastic and excited to introduce Alumni Analytics to universities and their alumni,” said Lydia Frank, Editorial Director, PayScale. “We strongly believe that an education should be helping to prepare each student for success in their chosen career – especially with tuition costs on the rise. And while PayScale has its founding roots in compensation, we have a keen awareness from our robust dataset that there are many important factors beyond salary potential that contribute to an individual’s career success – things like employability, job satisfaction, job meaning. We’ve been collecting this type of data from college graduates for years. We’ll be able to help schools look at the complete picture.”
PayScale publishes two annual reports on alumni career outcomes – the PayScale College Salary Report and the PayScale College ROI Report.
Adds Frank: “The addition of Alumni Analytics will provide a valuable supplement to PayScale’s long-standing analysis of the intersection of the labor market and higher education. As debates rage on about the burden of student loan debt, the widening skills gap, and the shifting landscape of higher education, understanding where graduates are experiencing success and where they’re experiencing challenges in the workplace will provide significant insight to schools, parents, students and policymakers.”
About PayScale
Creator of the largest database of individual compensation profiles in the world containing more than 40 million salary profiles, PayScale, Inc. provides an immediate and precise snapshot of current market salaries to employees and employers through its online tools and software. PayScale's products are powered by innovative search and query algorithms that dynamically acquire, analyze and aggregate compensation information for millions of individuals in real time. Publisher of the quarterly PayScale Index™, PayScale's subscription software products for employers include PayScale MarketRate™ and PayScale Insight™. More than 3,000 enterprise subscription customers in 13 countries rely on PayScale’s products to make salary decisions for more than two million employees. Among PayScale's corporate customers are organizations small and large across industries including Mozilla, Tully’s Coffee, Clemson University and the United States Postal Service. For more information, visit http://www.PayScale.com.
Steven Gottlieb, PayScale, http://www.payscale.com, +1 (206) 427-9591, [email protected]
Share this article