Victoria University (VU) is a dual-sector (higher education and TAFE) tertiary institution based in Melbourne, Australia. VU has eight colleges, each covering a broad discipline of study, six research institutes and seven research centres. The University has nine campuses in Melbourne’s CBD and western region, and a tenth campus in Sydney. It also offers courses at partner institutions throughout Asia. More than 42,861 students, including around 13,500 international students, study VU courses worldwide.

In 2018, VU transformed the way it delivers courses through a new way of teaching and learning called the VU Block Model. VU is the first university in Australia to teach using block mode. VU is also renowned for leveraging technological advances to build improved course delivery methods and outcomes for students and creating job-ready, industry-experienced and highly employable graduates. More than 91% of employers express satisfaction with VU graduates’ employability skills and VU is rated first in the country for employability skills (2020 Employer Satisfaction Survey, QILT). VU is dedicated to offering a diverse range of students access to the skills and qualifications they need in the future, and innovation is required to do this in a rapidly changing world.

The VU Website Visitor Analytics Dashboard and Jobs Insights Dashboard – linked to O*NET OnLine and Government Future Outlook to monitor real jobs data – offer information on positive and negative growth trends in employment in relation to the courses offered by VU and the study areas of interest to prospective VU students. In this way, the Dashboards identify and then compare VU’s current study offering with what prospective students want to study, along with data on the skills that are predicted to be in demand in future workplaces when these students graduate.

This data set provides the capacity to search particular fields of employment via detailed job titles to display projected employment growth or decline over coming years – as well as match these results with courses and units offered at VU. By combining the insights from both dashboards, the University is able to gain a holistic view of which fields are most relevant to prospective students (via top search terms) and assess these against projected job growth to discover whether there are potentially marketable gaps in course offering.  This ensures VU constructs new courses to maximise market relevance and employment outcomes for graduates well into the future.