HEA National Employer Survey 2024

RED C Research & Marketing conducted a telephone survey of employers in Ireland on behalf of key agencies in the higher and further education sectors, including the Higher Education Authority (HEA), Solas, and the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science.

The 2024 survey, the fourth of its kind, aimed to gather the views of employers on higher and further education outcomes, in terms of their own recruitment, satisfaction with graduates, future skills needs of the company/sector and interest in engagement with educational institutions.

The survey sampled a wide range of employers from different sectors, company sizes, and ownership types, with a total of n=750 interviews conducted via computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) over a six-week period from May to July 2024.

The survey sample was structured to ensure representativity across business sectors using NACE codes. NACE is the European statistical classification of economic activities, and it provides a reference framework for the production and dissemination of statistics related to economic activities. Statistics produced based on NACE are comparable at European level and, in general, at world level in line with the United Nations’ International Standard Industrial Classification of Economic Activities (ISIC).

The final data was weighted to reflect the population based on employee numbers from the Central Statistics Office (CSO).