Deans Insight: The New Platform Tracking Every Business School Alum’s Career

Business schools spend enormous energy tracking graduates in the months after commencement. After that, the trail often goes cold. A new research platform aims to pick it up – and follow it for decades.

Benjamin Stévenin, former director of business school solutions and partnerships at Times Higher Education, which owns Poets&Quants, has launched Deans Insight with Andre Guerassimov, co-founder and CEO of Justfind, which enables companies and alumni associations to keep their contact databases constantly updated. Deans Insight collects publicly available professional profile data to build detailed portraits of B-school alumni: where they work, how fast they advance, which companies hire them, where they live and what ventures they launch. It draws on a pool of some 800 million profiles.

“We started building the tool four months ago,” Stévenin tells P&Q in an interview September 28. “We went to market two weeks ago.”

Already, he says, Deans Insight has half a dozen clients, and dozens of schools have approached the four-person team about research projects. Some schools have even asked about building a ranking based on employability.

FROM REPORT TO DASHBOARD

The platform has two components. The first is a report that distills a school’s alumni base into headline figures: the share currently employed, the share in executive roles, the number of countries where alumni live, the percentage who have founded a company, the top sectors and employers, and the jobs and capital generated by alumni-founded ventures.

The second is an interactive dashboard that lets schools drill down. They can track career velocity – how long it takes alumni to reach senior, manager, director and executive levels. They can see which degrees alumni earned before and after their time at the school, and where those who left for further study went. They can view entry-level job titles by function and graduating class, the companies that employ the most alumni today and over time, and the most senior alumni at blue-chip employers and Big Tech firms. Many entries link straight to the individual’s public profile.

Other modules map alumni by country and city; flag which countries are gaining or losing alumni; identify the most influential alumni in a given market; and show which sectors have the highest share of alumni signaling they are open to work. A founders module tracks serial entrepreneurs, capital raised, and ventures by sector, country, and graduating class. Schools can also build custom segments – say, bachelor’s graduates now working at Google – and either generate a full report for that group or export it.

INSIDE ONE SCHOOL’S NUMBERS

In a demonstration for P&Q, Stévenin walks through the dashboard for a prominent European school with nearly 225,000 affiliated profiles spread across more than 200 countries and territories. About 80% of those alumni currently hold a job, and roughly a quarter are in executive roles. The dashboard shows it takes alumni three years to reach senior level, four to become a manager, six to reach director, and eight to reach the executive ranks. 

Some 8.4% have founded a company at some point in their careers, and 5% are founders today. Alumni have founded more than 11,000 companies, which have created roughly 312,000 jobs.

The data also shows where the school loses students. Of about 41,000 alumni who earned a bachelor’s degree there, fewer than 2,700 went on to a master’s at the school, while some 10,000 went elsewhere for graduate study – and the dashboard shows which rival institutions they chose. Roughly 28,000 stopped after the bachelor’s.

A SAMPLE REPORT

A shareable sample report Stévenin provided, prepared for a leading U.S. business school and built on a 500-profile sample, shows how granular the output gets. Among its findings, 91.8% of alumni hold an active role, 43.4% have reached director level or above, and 40.2% have founded or co-founded a company; 26% are running one today. The median graduate from the last 10 classes lands a first professional role two months after graduation.

The report tallies nearly 29,000 jobs created by alumni-founded companies and $7.5 billion raised by 61 alumni ventures over a recent 14-month window. It breaks that capital down by funding stage, sector, geography, and round size, and identifies 13 alumni who founded companies it classes as unicorns or “thoroughbreds” – a company with at least $100 million in annual revenue that grew efficiently, often profitably and without huge amounts of venture capital.

It also goes well beyond headline outcomes. Cohort snapshots show where alumni stand one, five, 10, and 20 years after graduation. A tenure analysis shows how long alumni stay at major employers. Sector-flow charts trace career moves, such as the two-way traffic between banking and tech. Metrics carry definitions and denominators, and the report flags where recent classes are still too young to read reliably.

Some modules are plainly built with alumni relations and fundraising offices in mind. One lists alumni in C-suite roles at venture-backed companies, and another highlights the most active board members, mentors and volunteers in each sector.

SCHOOLS BENCHMARKING SCHOOLS

The feature Stévenin is most excited about is the newest: a benchmarking tool that lets a school compare its alumni outcomes against those of peer institutions, or compare national systems, such as all the schools in one European country against those in another. The data covers schools worldwide, including in the U.S.

For now, Deans Insight clients can benchmark against five peers. The limit, he says, reflects both the small number of schools aggregated so far and the cost of processing the data.

“It’s millions and millions of profiles,” says Stévenin. “So there is a cost in AI in the back end.”

That same infrastructure lets the team move quickly. Once the data is in hand, Stévenin says, he can produce a new report in about five minutes.

WHAT THE DATA SHOWS

One recent analysis examines the first jobs of graduates from 23 French schools in the Financial Times‘ Master in Management ranking. It tracks the most common first titles across recent graduating classes and shows financial auditor and management controller roles on the rise.

“Project manager is dying,” says Stévenin. “Consultant is slowly dying.”

The analysis also highlights where individual schools diverge from the market. At one school, for example, graduates enter fashion, beauty, and luxury at a markedly higher rate than their peers elsewhere. Stévenin says the team plans to narrow its time frames to five- to 10-year windows, broken out by year, to sharpen the trend lines.

He argues that the platform fills a gap most institutions can’t close on their own.

“At the moment, they are barely able to do it for their own alumni,” says Stévenin. “So here we are beyond what they can do.”

Learn more about Deans Insight here.

DON’T MISS THE ‘RESEARCHERIZATION’ OF FACULTY IS DISTORTING BUSINESS SCHOOLS

© Copyright 2026 Poets & Quants. All rights reserved. This article may not be republished, rewritten or otherwise distributed without written permission. To reprint or license this article or any content from Poets & Quants, please submit your request HERE.