一句话：提出 Career Velocity 指标，用校友目录与公开就业数据衡量学位项目对晋升高级软件工程职位速度的影响。
专业软件工程学位项目需要评估其对毕业生职业发展的影响，但仅靠就业率和薪资中位数难以刻画晋升，且校友调查回复率常偏低。本文提出 Career Velocity 指标：将校友目录中的姓名、学位名称和毕业年份关联到公开就业历史，计算毕业生晋升到高级软件工程职位所需月数。作者在六个本科与研究生计算机科学、软件工程和数据科学项目上开发并评估该指标，并进一步分析毕业前行业经验月数的影响。结果表明，无论先前行业经验如何，面向特定职业类别（如软件工程）的专业教育比通用教育带来更快的职业晋升。
Professional software engineering (SE) degree programs provide students with the education and skills needed to enter a new SE career, or take on increasing responsibility within their current career. An important metric for evaluating such programs is the impact that completing the program has on postgraduate, career outcomes. Apart from hiring rates and median salaries, this is challenging to measure, because alumni survey response rates are frequently low, and without alumni feedback, insight into individual career advancement after graduation is difficult to observe. In this paper, we propose a new metric, called Career Velocity, that measures the impact of a degree program on alumni promotion into senior positions. The metric requires tracing alumni directory information, consisting of a person’s full name, degree name, and graduation year, to public data that includes employment histories, before computing the number of months prior to promotion into a senior SE position. The metric was developed and evaluated on a mix of six degree programs, including undergraduate and graduate computer science, software engineering and data science programs. The metric was further evaluated by assessing the impact of a graduate’s number of months of industry experience prior to graduation. The results suggest that, independent of prior industry experience, specialized education that targets advancement in a specific career class, e.g., software engineering, leads to faster career progression than general education.