Why Every UK University Needs Better Career Data (And How to Get It)

University careers services in the UK face an impossible brief. They are expected to guide students toward informed career decisions using data that is outdated, incomplete, or locked behind paywalls. They are measured on graduate employment outcomes they cannot directly control. And they are doing all of this with budgets that have been static or shrinking in real terms for a decade.

The result is a sector that relies heavily on anecdote, intuition, and the occasional Destination of Leavers survey. That is not good enough — not for the £9,250 per year students are paying, and not for the careers services professionals who know they could do better with better tools.

The Problem With Current Approaches

Most university careers services have access to some form of salary data. The question is: how good is it?

HESA Graduate Outcomes Survey: This replaced the Destination of Leavers from Higher Education (DLHE) survey in 2018/19. It contacts graduates 15 months after completion and asks about employment status, job type, and salary. The response rate hovers around 50%. It is useful but limited — one snapshot in time, from a self-selecting group.

Prospects and Unistats: These platforms aggregate HESA data and present it to prospective students. The data is legitimate but surface-level. It tells you “85% of graduates from this course were in employment” but not what they earn five years later, or which specific careers they entered.

Commercial platforms: Services like Emsi (now Lightcast), GradIntelligence, and others offer more granular data but at price points of £5,000-£50,000+ per year. For a careers service with a budget of £200,000, that is a significant line item.

LMI for All (deceased): The free government API that many careers services depended on shut down in October 2025. Its closure left many tools and portals without their primary data source.

The result is a landscape where the best data exists but is hard to access, expensive to license, or requires significant technical capability to process.

What Good Career Data Looks Like

For career guidance to be genuinely useful, it needs to answer specific questions:

“What will I likely earn with this degree?” Not a national average. A trajectory — 1 year, 3 years, 5 years, 10 years. Broken down by subject, not just “graduates” as a monolithic category. Based on tax records, not surveys.

“What careers do people with my degree actually do?” Not the aspirational careers listed on course pages. The actual occupations that graduates enter, with realistic probabilities.

“How does my region affect my options?” A student at a northern university considering whether to move to London needs to understand not just the salary difference but the cost-of-living trade-off.

“Is this degree financially worthwhile?” Prospective students — especially those from lower-income backgrounds — deserve an honest answer to this question, not a marketing pitch.

“How do I compare to the benchmark?” For careers services reporting to university leadership, the ability to benchmark their graduates’ outcomes against the sector is essential for making the case for investment.

The Data That Answers These Questions Already Exists

The UK has two extraordinary datasets that, together, answer almost every question a careers service might face:

ASHE (Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings) covers 665 occupations with 11 years of salary data, broken down by gender, percentile (10th, 25th, median, mean, 75th, 90th), and work pattern (full-time, part-time).

LEO (Longitudinal Educational Outcomes) links education records to HMRC tax returns, tracking graduate earnings by subject, institution, region, and gender at 1, 3, 5, and 10 years after graduation.

These are not obscure datasets. They are published by the ONS and the Department for Education respectively. They are free. They are comprehensive. And they are dramatically underused by the higher education sector, primarily because processing them requires technical capability that most careers services do not have.

What We Built for Universities

CareerMetrics was built to make these datasets usable — for individual students exploring their options, and for universities providing career guidance at scale.

For students:

• Degree Outcomes Dashboard: Real salary data by subject, with gender breakdowns and trajectory charts
• ROI Calculator: Model the financial return on a specific degree, including student loan repayments
• Career Pathways: See which careers graduates from each subject actually enter

For careers services:

• Embeddable widgets: Drop a salary card or earnings chart into your university website or Moodle/Canvas page. Students see real salary data in the context they already use, without leaving your platform.

• LTI 1.3 integration: CareerMetrics embeds directly into your LMS. Students launch it from within their course, authenticated automatically through your institution’s login. No separate accounts needed.

• Analytics dashboard: See how your students engage with career data — which subjects they explore, which tools they use, which careers they research. This informs your guidance strategy and helps justify investment to university leadership.

• Benchmarking: Configure your institution’s key subjects and compare graduate outcomes against national benchmarks. Track whether your students are above or below the median for their subject.

• API access: For institutions with their own platforms, the CareerMetrics API provides programmatic access to ASHE and LEO-derived data. Build your own tools on top of real data.

The Cost Question

We are not pretending this is free. University licences run from £500 to £5,000 per year depending on institution size and feature set. But consider what that buys relative to the alternatives:

A Lightcast (Emsi) licence starts at £15,000+. A custom data processing project to handle ASHE and LEO data internally would cost £20,000-£50,000 in developer time, plus ongoing maintenance. LMI for All was free but is gone.

CareerMetrics provides processed, current data from the same underlying government sources, with consumer-facing tools that students can use directly and institutional features that careers services need. At a fraction of the cost of alternatives.

The Larger Argument

Career guidance is not a soft service. It is infrastructure. The decisions students make about what to study, where to work, and which careers to pursue have lifelong financial and personal consequences. Those decisions should be informed by the best available data, not by anecdote and aspiration.

The UK has the data to provide genuinely world-class career guidance. The LEO dataset is unique globally — no other country links education to tax records at this scale. ASHE is among the most detailed occupation-level salary surveys in the world.

What has been missing is the layer that makes this data usable by the people who need it: students making decisions, and the professionals guiding them.

That is what we built.

If you work in a university careers service and want to see how CareerMetrics could work for your institution, get in touch. We offer pilot programmes for institutions that want to evaluate the platform before committing.