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What do Graduates do?

Graduate Destinations

Each year, all universities in Ireland and the UK survey their graduates to determine their first destination after leaving university.

In Ireland, this data is used by the HEA to gather national statistics.

Reports
Galway

What do Ireland's Graduates do?

The HEA have interactive dashboards detailing the results of the national survey available on Graduate Outcomes: Data & Reports
These detail results from 2017 and subsequent years.

Higher Education Outcomes Graduation Years 2010-2014: https://hea.ie/assets/uploads/2018/02/Final-CSO-HEA-Report-Higher-Education-Outcomes.pdf

The HEA have all their publications available from https://hea.ie/resource-category/statistics/publications/

(please click Galway tab above for results our graduate survey)

Latest survey results - 2025

In 2026 the Career Development Centre surveyed the class of 2025 for the Graduate Outcomes Survey.

The survey of graduates of 2026 will take place in spring/summer 2027 - to take part see Graduate Survey.

Main activity	UG	PG	Total
Working full-time	44.8%	65.0%	53.7%
Working part-time	3.8%	15.1%	8.8%
Due to start a job within 3 months	0.2%	0.4%	0.3%
Full-time further study or training	42.7%	5.2%	26.1%
Part-time further study or training	0.4%	0.8%	0.6%
Unemployed and looking for work	2.7%	9.5%	5.7%
Other Activity	2.1%	2.5%	2.3%
Working full-time & study part-time	2.0%	0.8%	1.5%
Working part-time & study full-time	1.1%	0.4%	0.8%
Working part-time & study part-time	0.1%	0.3%	0.2%