July 20, 2026
In 2023/24, UK higher education providers awarded 1,053,060 qualifications, the first time the annual total has passed one million (source: HESA, Higher Education Student Statistics: UK 2023/24, 2025). Every graduating cohort of that scale feeds the alumni base a careers service or alumni-relations team must keep engaged for decades. Fifteen months after graduating, 88% of 2022/23 graduates were in work or further study and 76% of those in work held high-skilled roles (source: HESA, Graduate Outcomes 2022/23, 2025), so employability is a measured institutional KPI, not a soft benefit. Sustaining that support past the survey window is the hard part.
The recurring intake is large and durable: UK providers enrolled 2,904,425 students in 2023/24 and awarded 1,053,060 higher education qualifications that year, including 465,240 first degrees (source: HESA, Higher Education Student Statistics: UK 2023/24, 2025). Graduate outcomes are measured nationally through the Graduate Outcomes survey, which drew 358,045 usable responses from 917,610 eligible graduates in 2022/23 and found 59% in full-time employment 15 months on (source: Graduate Outcomes, 2022/23 results, 2025). For an alumni network the constraint is rarely the size of the audience, it is presenting each graduate with genuine, still-open roles.
Spacewalk gives your institution a branded, alumni-only job board, so your team spends its time on engagement rather than trawling job boards.
Build your branded Spacewalk job board and invite your talent community in minutes
Whether you choose to stream roles automatically, invite employers or post them yourself they are automatically matched to your talent pool
Track applications, placements and community engagement from one reporting dashboard
Unlike generic job boards, Spacewalk gives you a branded, private or public jobs marketplace your talent actually trust, with sourcing, matching and reporting running automatically in the background.
Alumni data held by a careers service or alumni-relations team is personal data under UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, so processing needs a lawful basis under Article 6, which for alumni marketing is usually consent or legitimate interests with an assessment where relied upon. Alumni email and SMS marketing also fall under the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) (source: ICO, UK GDPR and direct marketing guidance).
From 5 February 2026 the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 introduced a "charitable purposes soft opt-in", letting charitable bodies email supporters who have shown interest in their charitable purpose without prior consent, subject to strict conditions (source: ICO, charitable soft opt-in guidance, 2026). It cannot be used to promote or sell products or services, so a commercial careers feature would not automatically fall under it. Right-to-work checks remain the hiring employer's responsibility, and candidate data should only be matched to genuine, employer-direct vacancies. This is context, not legal advice.
This is an illustrative scenario, not a customer story. A UK university alumni relations team stands up a branded, alumni-only job board and invites both recent leavers and graduates from earlier cohorts. Instead of forwarding job links, the careers service watches an employer-direct feed match each alumnus to live, relevant roles, and sees application and interview activity. When the university asks how the service supports employability, the team exports registrations and landings rather than assembling anecdotes.
With participant-level data. Spacewalk tracks registrations, board usage, applications, interviews and landings, so your careers service can show the institution what happened to alumni rather than a summary of events run.
By offering what open aggregators do not: verified, active, employer-direct roles, alumni-only access and curation matched to each graduate, rather than recycled or duplicated listings.
Yes. Your alumni community gets its own branded board, so the experience carries your institution's brand rather than a generic job site.
From an employer-direct stream of verified, active roles with direct apply links, matched to each graduate's skills, seniority and location. Your team can also post roles or invite employers to post, but the vacancies are not scraped from job boards or aggregators.
Not automatically. The Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 soft opt-in, in force from 5 February 2026, covers charitable-purpose messages but cannot be used to promote or sell products or services, so a commercial careers feature still needs its own lawful basis under UK GDPR and PECR.
UK GDPR, the Data Protection Act 2018 and PECR for electronic marketing. In practice that means a lawful basis, clear privacy information, data minimisation and defined retention periods for alumni records, in line with ICO guidance.
Spacewalk supports university alumni networks and careers services worldwide, including alumni job board software in the United States, alumni career platforms for Australian institutions and alumni software for Canadian universities.
Explore Spacewalk for UK university careers offices, UK professional associations, UK employability programmes and UK skills bootcamps.
