Presenter biographies

Dawn Bennett is Distinguished Professor of Higher Education with Curtin University. Her research focuses on the development of employability and graduate work. Dawn is a National Senior Australian Learning and Teaching Fellow operationalising a metacognitive model for employability with faculty and students in Australia, the UK, Europe and the US.

Sonia Ferns is Manager of Course Design and WIL Governance at Curtin. She is a Director on the ACEN Board and has been involved in many national projects on WIL. She has published extensively on industry engagement and WIL and works with a national consortium of WIL researchers.

Dr Sophie Lindsay lectures at Monash University in the Business and Economics Faculty. Her research interest is the intersection between marketing and public health and how this intersection differs cross-culturally. She also focusses on consumer behaviour and the different ways we – as a society – make sense of products and services. Supporting work-integrated learning at Monash includes current teaching in capstone units. This teaching focus has influenced growing research projects in Employability, as well as exploring barriers to student success.

Julia Richardson is Associate Professor of HRM at Curtin University. Prior to coming to Australia. Her research interests focus primarily on themes relating to contemporary careers including individual and organisational career management practices, changing work arrangements and relationships, work-life balance and career change.

Dr Rachel Sheffield is an educator in science education in the School of Education at Curtin. She is interested in helping students develop their teacher identity and reduce the attrition that is currently impacting on graduating teachers

Presenter overviews

Employability development involves the cognitive and social development of learners as individuals, professionals and social citizens. Dawn will set the scene for the webinar by discussing how to embed this development within existing curriculum. She will share research-enabled tools and resources that help scaffold employability learning, including that gained within WIL experiences.

Julia will talk about the connections between the Developing Employability initiative and the contemporary career marketplace. She will highlight how the initiative supports career sustainability both with regard to fulfilling professional potential and maintaining individual life-balance. A key message will be the extent to which the site and its resources encourage individuals to take responsibility for their own career/professional development, with respect to both reflective practice and future planning. Drawing on specific examples, she will show how the site enables users to manage, prepare for and find professional and personal fulfilment on their own terms.

The Literacies for Life model is a useful framework for scaffolding WIL in curriculum to provide a developmental approach to employability. Sonia will outline how the model affords a multi-disciplinary and holistic approach to curriculum design.

Rachel will describe how she is using the employability tool to help her first-year PST (pre-service teachers) to identify their skills and start thinking about how to exercise more agency over their learning.

Sophie will be discussing integration of an employability self-assessment tool into a business capstone unit. Suitability for a flipped classroom design will be explained, as well explaining written and image based curriculum engagement by 3rd year business who participated in an employability focused workshop. Examples of student team based images will be shared to conclude.

Recording

Due to technical difficulties the recording is not available for this webinar.