Our Membership Feedback Survey, which ran in November 2023, gave us some useful insight into our members’ expectations and some great new ideas to explore in the coming year. The feedback was fairly evenly split between Corporate (59%) and Affiliate (41%) members, with Higher Education representing the bulk of Affiliate member feedback.
Evaluating our existing services

Our SAGEA Newsletter (87,5%), Quarterly Networking Events (84,93%) and Career Services Dashboard (78,09%) were ranked as our most useful offerings. These were followed closely by our Graduate Attributes Webinar Series (76,39%), Biennial Recruitment Conference (65,76%) and Biennial Development Conference (61,65%).
It is clear from both this as well as our 2024 Conference evaluation that networking opportunities afforded by the conference are of paramount importance and value to our members. We’ve heard you and will be adapting our Conference format to allow for more quality networking time together!
Our website, www.sagea.org.za, also continues to receive good ratings, with our Resources section, our Event calendar and our Toolkit Series receiving the highest usefulness ratings.
Our Employer Benchmarking Insights and Candidate Insights remain our most valued research projects, receiving “extremely useful” ratings from 60,27% and 67,61% of our survey respondents respectively. We are due for a Bursary and Scholarships Insights refresh (rated “extremely useful” or “useful” by 67% of our members), and are exploring some additional research projects based on specific member requests. Thank you to those members who put in the effort to participate in our research projects. These Insights are only as useful as the data we can collect, and we could not achieve quality research without you!
Student offerings adding value
In recent years, SAGEA has added a selection of student-facing offerings to our membership benefits. These offerings provide solutions to our Higher Education members who do not have the resources to develop their own, and extra support for those who do. They also provide our Corporate members with solutions to create awareness of their employer brands and attract talent.

The VirtualGradExpo continues to receive good ratings from those employers and Higher Education Institutions who made use of the service, with 68% of employers and 62% of Higher Education Institutions rating the expo as useful or extremely useful. We will proceed with a VirtualGradExpo in 2024, and are considering ways in which to tailor the expo towards more bespoke talent requirements this year.
Graduateemployersofchoice.co.za – our SAGEA Employers of Choice showcase website – also received excellent ratings, with employers who made use of the platform rating the Company Profiles (78%) and Graduate Opportunity Listing and Mailshots (68%) as useful or extremely useful. Awareness of this platform is lower than we expected, though, so please look out for more information on how to get the most out of this platform in 2024.
QuantifyYourFuture, SAGEA’s niche offering aimed at developing graduates in quantitative fields towards emerging careers in data, is also performing well with a rating of 62% useful or extremely useful.
New or returning offerings
We asked if our members would be interested in participating in a few of our past offerings. Of these, 72.22% said they would be interested in attending a Graduate Development Masterclass, and so this development opportunity is back on the cards for 2024.
We have also heard the call from our Higher Education members for support more specifically tailored for them and their students. Please look out for more information about the offerings SAGEA already has in place for Higher Education, as our survey indicates a lack of awareness about some of our initiatives in this space. We aim to explore other ways we can support our colleagues in this space.
Overall, 83% of our members are “extremely likely” to recommend SAGEA to a friend or colleague! We are thrilled to have your support and endorsement, and we appreciate your feedback greatly. We have a lot to look forward to in 2024, and we look forward to engaging with you in ever-more meaningful ways.