More information about the Student Exit Survey

Objective

The annual Student Exit Survey was implemented by the Treasury Board Secretariat to collect information from students about their employment experiences in the federal public service.

The Student Exit Survey provides a snapshot of students’ work experiences in their current organization to help improve the student orientation process and ensure that students are provided with meaningful learning opportunities.

The Student Exit Survey asks questions about recruitment and onboarding; well-being; communications; job fit; and career aspirations.

Timing

The Student Exit Survey is administered for a period of 4 weeks towards the end of the summer student work term, from early August to early September. It has been conducted annually since summer 2017.

Survey administrator

The Treasury Board Secretariat is responsible for administering the Student Exit Survey online questionnaire using the survey software SimpleSurvey as the corporate tool.

Eligibility to participate

The Student Exit Survey is administered to student employees in the federal public service hired for a summer work term through a student employee program (Federal Student Work Experience Program (FSWEP), Post-secondary Co-operative Education and Internship Program (CO-OP/Internship), Research Affiliate Program (RAP)) and any other student program. Student employees whose work terms were extended or who were rehired for a consecutive work term are also eligible to participate.

Confidentiality of responses

Survey responses will be protected under the Privacy Act. No data that can be traced to respondents will be released. To safeguard respondents’ identity and to ensure the confidentiality of responses, responses will always be grouped, and no data will be made available for groups of fewer than 10 respondents. Individual responses will never be published or shared with government departments or agencies.

Survey results

Survey results are shared with participating organizations in late fall. Departments and agencies receive an aggregate dataset of their results, with appropriate suppression rules applied for small respondent counts as is done for the Public Service Employee Survey.