Conference Day Two: Thursday, 29 August 2019
8:45 am - 9:15 am Conference Registration and Welcome Coffee
9:15 am - 9:20 am Opening Remarks by IQPC and the Conference Chair
9:20 am - 10:00 am Delivering an Effective Employability Strategy that Goes Beyond Employment Rates
10:00 am - 10:40 am Repositioning employability as a whole-of-institution concern: EmployABILITY and how to think for a living
This case study will offer an insight into Curtin Universities employability strategies. Specifically in supporting students through their professional development and integrated employability into the core business of the university.
- Development of the EmployABILITY starter kit
- Empowering students to self assess their employability
- Exploring how data from the self- reflection tool can be used to enhance employability outcomes
Professor Dawn Bennett
Director of Developing Employability & Creative Workforce InitiativesCurtin University
10:40 am - 11:10 am MORNING TEA AND NETWORKING BREAK
11:10 am - 11:50 am How To Attract, Retain (And Lose) Host Organisations: Managing Industry Risk In WIL Programs
11:50 am - 12:30 pm Transforming the Approach to Early Careers at Telstra
12:30 pm - 1:30 pm NETWORKING LUNCH
1:30 pm - 2:10 pm Measuring Employability through the Australian Graduate Employability Scale (AGRADES)
The Australian Graduate Employability Scale or AGRADES has been developed as a bespoke measure of employability for the Australian higher education context. AGRADES is intended to assess personal qualities related to career self-management. In this session we will discuss the design of AGRADES, and ways that AGRADES can be used with students as a self-reflection tool in career counselling or in educational group settings. This session will:
- Explore the use of AGRADES to evaluate the impact of employability curricula such as Work Integrated Learning
- AGRADES is a free resource available to Australian higher education institutions
- Development of this tool, by funding from Graduate Careers Australia.
2:10 pm - 2:50 pm Development of Professional Identity through Work Integrated Learning
Contemporary work requires new graduates to have a strong awareness of professional practice. A sufficiently formed professional identity will better enable graduating students to perform and contribute as they transition from university to the workplace. Yet is it realistic to expect this of new graduates? Is higher education sufficiently focused on developing this critical yet underexplored dimension of graduate employability? Denise will draw on her recent research to
- Consider the meaning of professional identity and its importance for future work.
- Highlight the value of workplace learning experiences for developing professional identity among higher education students,
- Present strategies used in her own work integrated learning programs at Edith Cowan University.
Denise Jackson
Director, Work-Integrated Learning School of Business and LawEdith Cowan University
