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  • First-Destination Standards Implementation Yields Valuable Partnership

    During the implementation of NACE’s First-Destination Survey Standards and Protocols, the staff at the University of California – Santa Barbara (UCSB) reevaluated its entire process of collecting first-destination surveys.

    In the past, the career center sent out a survey to June graduates only.

    “We then merged our questions into the campus senior survey, which required that we remove some of our questions due to the campus survey’s length,” explains Ignacio Gallardo, director of UCSB’s career center. “With the new standards, we started looking around at other campus surveys for assistance and noticed that many were using the NACE survey nearly verbatim.”

    Gallardo and his staff added some questions from the NACE survey and reformatted others to add into UCSB’s existing survey.

    The career center also leveraged a partnership it had established with the UCSB Institutional Research Office to review its assessment efforts the year before the release of the First-Destination Survey Standards and Protocols.

    “The result of the new collaboration was a slimmed-down version of our survey to be inserted into the campus senior survey,” Gallardo says. “With the new standards and the springtime crunch for the institutional research survey, we decided to pull our questions out of the campus survey and create our own for this past year. In the coming months we will be meeting with institutional research to discuss options to streamline surveys sent to our graduates.”

    On the back end, the UCSB career center began using a statistical software package—one that has been employed by institutional research—to collect survey results.

    “There was, and there continues to be, a learning curve,” Gallardo says. “Fortunately, we have access to campus staff members who can assist us. Through this process, we reviewed our survey, and created a better system of collecting and disseminating the information, and we have developed valuable partnerships with departments on campus.”

    Get the standards and protocols, plus additional resources you can use to collect, analyze, and report data for the Class of 2014 on NACEWeb.