University of Huddersfield partnered with Lightcast to develop a career guidance tool using AI-driven LMI, delivering unexpected benefits for the institution and employers. Dave Stanbury, the university’s Deputy Head of Careers, and Carrie Williams from Lightcast, explain how they did it.
Most students are concerned about what they can do with their degree and what jobs are out there. The award-winning Graduate Career Explorer (GCE) provides answers to these questions.
This intuitive student facing Labour Market Information (LMI) dashboard achieves this by handling 500 million data points and reporting on 48,000 job titles mapped to 300 undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at the University of Huddersfield (UoH).
Why do we need GCE?
The UoH is committed to widening participation, but our home students face multiple barriers including low regional salaries, a reluctance to relocate or commute for work and a reliance on family/friends for career information.
While the constraints of social and cultural capital are not unique to Huddersfield, Asian heritage students, who form a significant proportion of our local students, are typically less likely to consider relocating for work than white students (Briton, et al., 2021).
By contrast, our international students are very prepared to move for jobs. But, despite being highly mobile, they can be hampered by not knowing how graduate jobs are spread across the complex labour markets of the four devolved nations.
The aim of GCE was to provide an easy way for students to see not only what types of jobs were related to their degree, but precisely where those opportunities were across the whole of the UK using near-real time data.
The tool is designed to both give answers and provoke further research. Students can use it on their own, with support from a careers advisor or work through it in an employability workshop or lecture.
How GCE works
The GCE dashboard uses AI driven data to seek out jobs advertised over the last 12 months that are relevant to a particular degree.
Adverts are de-duplicated and matched to the degree selected using Lightcast’s sophisticated occupational taxonomy, which is finer grained than the UK’s Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) codes and ensures we are speaking the same language as employers.
Students can see the number of jobs and top companies within a particular commuting radius. They can also drill down to see which employers are active, what roles are advertised and what employers are looking for:
- Job Title tab - lists the top 50 job titles, showing the number of jobs advertised for each job type. This expands the user’s occupational horizons, making them aware of a wider range of job titles and terms.
- Skills tab - lists the top 10 specialised skills mentioned in the adverts followed by the top 10 transferable skills. This can help students decide how to focus their skill development through work experience or module choice, or shape their CV.
- Salary tab – shows advertised salaries for a job type, or the job roles associated with a salary level.
- Employer tab - shows the top companies hiring in a particular field, enabling students to identify targets for research and networking.
- Location tab - shows the top towns and cities ranked with the number of opportunities over the last 12 months.
Students can also see ‘Direct Routes’ for their degree or ‘Further Possibilities’ (roles that may require further employment/qualifications). These functions provide contrasting horizons for action, throwing the net wider and opening up new avenues for exploration.
GCE also contains a live jobs feed which dynamically updates depending on the occupations selected. Furthermore, for finalists who spot a job they like they have the added benefit of getting information they can immediately act on, closing the loop between career exploration and job application.
What we learned
- One of our first challenges was how to create robust lists of degree relevant graduate roles. This turned out to be a valuable opportunity in engaging key stakeholders as we were able to work with course teams and careers advisers to create curated lists.
- Designing a dashboard which was intuitive and engaging for students was far from straight forward. An iterative cycle of user-test and redesign enabled the key functions to be refined. Considerable work went into making terminology consistent and self-explanatory. Scripts were recoded extensively to ensure that visually impaired users could navigate the site in a logical sequence.
- With over 500 million data points handling loading speeds were initially affected by buffering. However, this was resolved by creating nine data marts and moving the hosting onto the Tableau Community platform.
- With hindsight, designing the mobile enabled version before the desktop version, would probably have made it easier - start small and simple and then scale up for the wider screen view.
- It’s vital to collaborate with a credible partner. We had used the Lightcast Analyst platform over a number of years. As one of the leading global providers of LMI with expertise in developing dashboards, and trusted by UK government and statutory agencies, they were the natural choice.
- LMI actually can be engaging. In fact, the most frequent student reaction to GCE is ‘it’s cool!’
GCE in practice
GCE has been accessed thousands of times by our students. Feedback emphasises how GCE brings career options ‘to life’ and helps students really think about what is available and how they can adapt their approach to improve their prospects. 100% of international students surveyed said they would recommend the tool.
It has also been very well received across the university. All schools are embedding it in employability modules and it is already a key part of our award-winning employability and wellbeing co-curricular programme – the Global Professional Award. Other universities have also requested a GCE demo, so they can see for themselves what the system can do.
While we originally intended GCE to just cover undergraduate and taught-postgraduate degrees, in response to demand from key stakeholders we’re now developing content for degree apprenticeships and routes for PhDs.
Course Teams are also able to draw on GCE to get an overview of the changing employer landscape to inform curriculum design, so this has been built into our university-wide QA processes.
Unexpectedly, some employers have also used GCE to benchmark their person specifications against the wider sector.
Overall, GCE is a powerful catalyst for a data led approach to employability across the whole institution and has put up-to-date information on graduate opportunities directly into students’ hands, in a way which we never thought possible.
More broadly, it is also setting a new standard in the higher education sector, delivering an unparalleled level of customisable and detailed career exploration.
AI is the subject of ISE’s latest Pulse Survey. If you’re an employer we’d love to hear your views and experiences of the impact on entry-level jobs. Your responses are important as they will help inform how large an impact AI is having on our sector and we’ll share findings early 2026. Email ISE's Claire Tyler to get involved.