One of the hardest things for university graduates to overcome in finding their first job is that employers always want applicants with relevant experience as well as the right qualifications.
At RMIT, students are required to undertake work integrated learning, or 'WIL', prior to graduating to give them the best possible start in establishing their career.
The university is also investing substantial effort in rolling out programs to support students in having real-world learning experiences. RMIT is currently deploying a WIL management software system to every school and discipline within the University, including its two Vietnam campuses in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi.
This ambitious project has involved a mix of professional staff, consultants, vendors, contractors bringing wide range of experience and skills together to complete the project. Collectively, this project team contained a wealth of industry experience and connections - potentially a rich opportunity for students.
For their part, the project team were also interested in gaining better insight into the student's challenges as well as finding out more about the difficulties employers often face when presenting internship opportunities to universities.
Bringing in students work alongside the members of the project team allowed us to capture the opportunity for students whilst at the same time we gained first hand experience of the challenges for employers who run internship programs. The approach has been incredibly rewarding for everyone involved. As soon as we saw how effective it was we set ourselves a target to make up 50% of the project team with WIL students. We've been running with this mix now for the last 8 months and our focus is turning more to increasing the diversity of disciplines that we draw students from.
Andrew Sim, an RMIT Computer Science and Information Technology student, completed his WIL by working on RMIT's own WIL IT System implementation. So its a case of a WIL student doing their WIL by delivering a WIL solution. This self-reinforcing loop enabled a series of related benefits.
Watch Andrew's story
The university gained by keeping overall project costs lower than if we had used the standard model for a project like this, e.g. relying solely on contract staff working with consultants from the product vendor.
The product vendor gained too. To their credit, they already had a well established program for taking Interns from IT schools at local universities. What they had never experienced before was an intern who arrived at their front door on day one, knowing all about their product, how to configure, deploy and support it, as well as bringing a comprehensive knowledge of their customer's environment. It's the ideal employee really for a software development company. You know he can work in your development team, or customer support, or testing or even go out on-site with the Consulting team - because he already has!
Watch Siddesh's story
We learnt a lot about the challenges of working with students. We were very keen to gain deeper insights into this.
A common criticism of Intern and Placement programs from employers is they find them to be too hard to bother with, or are scared off by the red-tape that gets in the way of starting.
It turns out that actually working with students was pretty easy. Getting them started was quite challenging, in terms of the constraints of the university's practices and rules. Having done this now a few times we've learnt how to navigate through the obstacles quite easily, but it definitely didn't start that way.
International students who come to study at RMIT also have to complete work-integrated-learning. Many of these students lack local contacts or knowledge of companies they might approach here. For these students the only viable option is to return home and do their WIL there on the annual summer break. Doing WIL on campus works particularly well in this case. After their WIL experience with the WIL project, both Sokun and Siddesh have gone on to do subsequent Internships with Quantum, the Australian software company who make Inplace.
This experience working with Australian firms is highly valued and will give them a clear advantage when they return home to establish their careers there.
Watch Sokun's story
If you liked Andrew's video (did you remember to 'Like' it), or any of these stories then you should share them with your contacts in other companies and you should definitely share them with anyone who has kids approaching university age or studying at university now.
If you're wondering if this approach would only work with IT students, it doesn't. Over the last 2 years the RMIT WIL Project team has included students from Media and Communications, Landscape Architecture, Business as well from Computer Science.
So maybe you are thinking - did we actually get other WIL students to make the Videos? - You bet.
Check out Sam's Story about her experiences working the RMIT WIL Project team.
