Do Employers Rate Australian Graduates? The 2025 ESS Numbers
The 2025 Employer Satisfaction Survey shows 84.2% overall satisfaction with Australian graduates. Technical skills scored 94.0%. Here is how the data works, what it measures, and how to verify it.
Primary source: www.qilt.edu.au · source dated 2025 Employer Satisfaction Survey national report tables · verified on
Australian employers gave graduates an overall satisfaction rating of 84.2% in the 2025 Employer Satisfaction Survey (ESS), with technical skills the strongest attribute at 94.0%.
These figures come from the Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching (QILT) program, which runs the national ESS across all course levels and provider types.
The survey asks employers who have recently supervised a graduate to rate their satisfaction with that graduate’s skills.
The 84.2% figure is a point estimate from a sample survey, not a census of every employer in the country, so the published 90% confidence interval of 82.9% to 85.4% should be read alongside it.
The 2025 release also shows a year-on-year shift: overall satisfaction was 85.5% in 2024, meaning the 2025 number sits 1.3 percentage points lower, while technical skills rose from 92.7% to 94.0% over the same period.
What the 2025 ESS Measures
The Employer Satisfaction Survey is one of the four national surveys under QILT, alongside the Student Experience Survey, the Graduate Outcomes Survey, and the Graduate Outcomes Survey – Longitudinal.
The ESS targets employers who have recently supervised a graduate from an Australian higher education institution.
It is not a survey of graduates themselves, and it does not measure employment rates or starting salaries.
Instead, it captures how employers rate the skills of the graduates they have actually worked with.
The survey breaks satisfaction down into five attribute categories.
For 2025, across all course levels and all provider types, the national results are:
- Foundation skills: 93.3% (90% CI 92.4–94.1)
- Adaptive skills: 90.7% (90% CI 89.6–91.7)
- Collaborative skills: 88.6% (90% CI 87.5–89.7)
- Technical skills: 94.0% (90% CI 93.1–94.8)
- Employability skills: 86.2% (90% CI 85.0–87.4)
- Overall satisfaction: 84.2% (90% CI 82.9–85.4)
These are national aggregates.
They describe the average experience of employers across the whole higher education sector, not the performance of any single institution, campus, or individual graduate.
The standard deviation for overall satisfaction is 3.1 percentage points, which indicates that employer ratings vary around the national average rather than clustering tightly at one value.
How the Numbers Have Moved Over Five Years
Looking at the five-year trend helps put the 2025 figures in context.
The table below shows the national results for each attribute from 2021 to 2025, all measured across all course levels and provider types.
| Year | Foundation | Adaptive | Collaborative | Technical | Employability | Overall |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 93.5% | 90.3% | 89.3% | 93.7% | 86.6% | 85.3% |
| 2022 | 93.0% | 90.1% | 88.2% | 92.7% | 86.8% | 84.1% |
| 2023 | 91.2% | 88.7% | 86.0% | 92.2% | 84.1% | 83.7% |
| 2024 | 92.8% | 89.3% | 87.6% | 92.7% | 85.4% | 85.5% |
| 2025 | 93.3% | 90.7% | 88.6% | 94.0% | 86.2% | 84.2% |
Two patterns stand out.
Technical skills have improved steadily from 92.2% in 2023 to 94.0% in 2025, and foundation skills have recovered from a 2023 low of 91.2% back to 93.3%.
Overall satisfaction, however, has not followed the same upward path.
It peaked at 85.5% in 2024 and dropped to 84.2% in 2025, despite the improvement in technical and foundation skills.
The gap between the highest-rated attribute (technical at 94.0%) and the lowest (employability at 86.2%) is 7.8 percentage points, which suggests employers see a clear distinction between graduates’ technical preparation and their readiness for the practical demands of a workplace.
What the Field of Education Breakdown Shows
The national aggregate hides meaningful variation across fields of education.
The 2025 ESS publishes results by broad field, and the differences are large enough to matter for anyone interpreting the headline number.
Agriculture, environmental and related studies recorded the highest overall satisfaction at 90.0%, with technical skills at 98.3% and foundation skills at 100.0%.
Engineering and related technologies came in at 87.1% overall, with technical skills at 96.4%.
Education followed at 86.6% overall, with a more balanced profile across attributes.
Management and commerce sat at 84.7% overall, close to the national average, with technical skills at 92.3%.
Health recorded 84.5% overall and technical skills at 93.8%.
At the lower end, Information technology had an overall satisfaction of 81.5% despite technical skills of 97.4%.
Creative arts recorded 79.7% overall, the lowest of the listed fields, with technical skills at 90.7%.
Architecture and building came in at 81.6% overall, and Natural and physical sciences at 83.1%.
Society and culture sat at 81.8% overall.
The pattern is not uniform.
Some fields with very high technical ratings still show lower overall satisfaction, which reinforces that employers weigh more than technical competence when forming an overall judgement.
The confidence intervals for individual fields are wider than for the national aggregate because the sample sizes are smaller, so field-level differences should be interpreted with more caution.
Why the Survey Is a Sample, Not a Census
The ESS is a sample survey, and that distinction matters when reading any single number.
The published confidence intervals quantify the uncertainty around each point estimate.
For the 2025 national overall satisfaction figure of 84.2%, the 90% confidence interval runs from 82.9% to 85.4%.
This means that if the survey were repeated many times with the same methodology, the true population value would fall within that range in 90% of repetitions.
The standard deviation figures published alongside the results also provide context.
For overall satisfaction, the standard deviation is 3.1 percentage points, which is the largest among the six measures.
Foundation skills and employability skills both have a standard deviation of 2.8, while adaptive skills has the smallest at 2.1.
A larger standard deviation means employer responses are more spread out around the average, so the national figure is less representative of any individual employer’s experience.
QILT publishes its data processing and procedures documentation, which explains how the survey is administered, how responses are weighted, and how the estimates are calculated.
Anyone using these numbers for decisions should consult that documentation alongside the results tables.
How to Verify the Data Yourself
The primary source for all figures in this article is the QILT website, which publishes the ESS results tables and methodology documents.
The ComparED website is the public comparison tool built on QILT data, and it includes a help section explaining how to understand the data.
Both are official public sources, and the figures quoted here can be checked directly against the published tables.
When verifying, there are a few practical steps.
First, confirm you are looking at the Employer Satisfaction Survey and not the Graduate Outcomes Survey, which measures employment rates and salaries rather than employer satisfaction.
Second, check the year of the release; the 2025 data is the most recent available at the time of writing.
Third, note the population being described.
The national aggregate covers all course levels and all provider types, so it should not be compared directly with a single institution’s result without checking that the same scope applies.
QILT also publishes the methodology for each survey, including the Employer Satisfaction Survey page and the data processing procedures.
These documents describe the sampling frame, the survey instrument, and the estimation approach.
Reading them is the only way to understand exactly what the numbers represent.
What the Numbers Do Not Tell You
The ESS measures employer satisfaction with graduates’ skills, but it does not measure everything that matters about graduate outcomes.
It does not capture employment rates, starting salaries, or long-term career progression.
Those are covered by the Graduate Outcomes Survey and the Graduate Outcomes Survey – Longitudinal, which are separate instruments with their own methodology.
The ESS also does not rank institutions.
The national figures describe the sector as a whole, and the field-of-education breakdowns describe broad disciplinary groups.
Neither should be read as a league table of universities or courses.
The survey asks employers about graduates they have supervised, and the responses reflect the specific employment contexts those graduates entered, which vary widely by industry, occupation, and region.
Another limitation is that the survey captures employer perceptions, not objective measures of graduate performance.
Two employers in the same industry may rate the same type of graduate differently based on their expectations, the nature of the role, and the support available in the workplace.
The confidence intervals acknowledge this variability, and the standard deviation figures show that individual responses do not cluster tightly around the national average.
How This Connects to Choosing a Course or Institution
For prospective students, the ESS data is one input among many.
It describes how employers have rated graduates in the recent past, which is useful context but not a guarantee of future outcomes.
The field-of-education breakdowns can help identify broad areas where employers report higher satisfaction, but the differences between fields are not large enough to make a course decision on that basis alone.
The QILT website and ComparED allow users to look at results by institution and course, which provides a more granular view than the national aggregates.
However, any institution-level comparison should be made with the same care: check the survey year, the course level, and the sample size behind each figure.
A small sample can produce a very high or very low estimate that does not reflect the institution’s typical performance.
The data also has a practical use for employers.
If an employer is considering hiring a graduate, the ESS provides a sector-level picture of how other employers have rated graduates’ skills.
It does not predict how any individual graduate will perform, but it does indicate the areas where employers generally report the highest and lowest satisfaction.
The Bottom Line on the 2025 Numbers
The 2025 ESS shows that Australian employers are broadly satisfied with graduates, with an overall rating of 84.2% and technical skills at 94.0%.
The five-year trend shows improvement in technical and foundation skills, but a slight decline in overall satisfaction from 2024 to 2025.
The field-of-education breakdown reveals significant variation, with agriculture and engineering at the higher end and creative arts at the lower end.
These numbers are best understood as a snapshot of employer perceptions in a specific year, based on a sample survey with published confidence intervals.
They are not a ranking of institutions, a measure of employment outcomes, or a prediction of any individual graduate’s experience.
For anyone making decisions based on this data, the official QILT and ComparED sources are the place to verify every figure, and the methodology documents are essential reading for understanding what the survey actually measures.
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