Career Trajectory Analysis of Information Technology Alumni

Understanding alumni's career path is critical for an Information Technology (IT) program to engage existing students, get connected to alumni and adapt the curriculum to the ever-changing technology field. LinkedIn, the largest professional networking site, provides a wealth of publicly available career outcomes of educations from higher education institutions. In the paper, we present an alumni database architecture that can extract the data from alumni LinkedIn profiles, transform and load the data in a database for analysis. We collected over 600 LinkedIn profiles of alumni who have graduated with Bachelor of Science (BS) degrees and Master of Science (MS) degrees from an IT program. We analyzed and compared the career trajectory of BSIT and MSIT graduates. Our findings show that graduates from both programs in general were moving towards managerial positions as their career progressed. However, BSIT and MSIT alumni showed some different career paths. BSIT graduates were developed into two different job titles: engineers and managers; while MSIT alumni were gradually growing into more managerial and business types of positions, such as managers and analysts