Measures of professional success provided by surveys on higher education graduates can be divided into objective (e.g. income or professional position) and subjective (e.g. job satisfaction, reported use of knowledge and skills, work autonomy) indicators. In this article a broad range of measures of professional success is used to describe aspects of employment and work of graduates from 11 European countries and Japan and to analyse the relevance of structural conditions (e.g. country of the institution, type of study programme and field of study) and personal factors (e.g. gender, parental educational background, competences at the time of graduation, employment conditions e.g. economic sector, size of organisation, and the experiences after graduation). The analysis clearly demonstrates the relevance of both structural and personal factors, but no single variable prevails.