Professionally relevant learning: preparing students for the recruitment process

At Victoria University (VU) in Melbourne the university‘s Making VU‘ agenda includes a firm and practical commitment to promoting and enabling Learning in the Workplace and Community (L iWC). VU‘s broad definition of LiWC means that 25% of learning activities in a course involve learning in and through the workplace and community. VU‘s LiWC models and approaches include projects in a workplace, clinical placements, enterprise initiatives and simulated learning environments. An important feature of LiWC at VU is that it is characterized by an engagement with industry. A further important principle of LiWC at VU is that t he activity is beneficial for all parties: learner, university and part ner organisation. Many Australian universities are investigating how to nurture collaboration between universities and ̳the workplace‘ and the idea of industry and community engagement looms large in many universities‘ missions, policies and aims. This pa per seeks to both document the various ways that industry engagement manifests itself in business curriculum and evaluate the worth of that engagement from student and industry perspectives. This research examines the popular idea of engagement‘ and draw s on work undertaken in a current ALTC project, Engaging Industry: Embedding Professionally Relevant Learning in the Business Curriculum to discuss industry engagement. We focus on one learning activity in a third year unit at VU, Professional Development 3: Leadership and Challenge (PD3) , in a case study approach to highlight the various stages and depths of industry engagement in the development, delivery and evaluation of the whole PD3 unit and the particular whole - day activity: Assessment Centre Day. Th e paper considers how this unit expands students‘ cultural capital through networking opportunities with representatives from industry and considers how students benefit from individualised feedback from recruitment experts. The Assessment Centre Day provi des an important simulation of real world recruitment practices and we report on student responses from unit evaluations, activity evaluations and focus group discussion. This LiWC activity provide s an exciting learning environment for students to demonst rate the skills and knowledge they have developed throughout their degree. Students are particularly motivated by the physical presence of real‘ industry people in their curriculum and the program needs to consider ways to make this presence sustainable. The conclusion includes a review of the liaison processes with industry, highlighting the lessons learnt which have clear implications for the sustainability of engaging industry in undergraduate curriculum