Commentary by Robert Field, Director UNE Metro Sydney & Regions

The benefits of student placements are well documented. Providing students with Work Integrated Learning (WIL) significantly enhances their student experience and employment outcomes.

There are a number of courses with compulsory work experience components and others with elective options. But for many students there is a real shortage of placement options.

During a catch-up chat with a colleague, I became aware of their ongoing problem of finding placements for students studying social work.

Greater Sydney is an engine room of employment, so I thought that I could help with solving this problem. I suggested to her that we do a pilot project for social work placements out of UNE Metro – Sydney. Given Metro Sydney’s history in successful partnerships, I thought we would be able to use our networks in the local community to assist with placements.

Based on our current partners I suggested to her a number of likely organisations and businesses that might take students for work experience placements.

To come up with our pitch to the organisations, we distilled the key aspects of what basis the relationship would be — in simple terms, what is in it for the organisation and what’s in it for UNE, and the impact it would have for the students.

We decided on our approach.

1. I would, at various networking events, approach the relevant person in a likely organisation and introduce the idea of UNE Social work students doing a work placement with them. If they were interested, I would set up a meeting with that person, my colleague and myself. I cannot stress too highly the value of community contacts and the importance of face-to-face networking at this stage of the process.

2. The face-to-face meeting with an organisation’s representative contained the following elements,

• a short “getting to know us” section on the University e.g. history, demographics, courses and the strategic plan that directs our community engagement efforts;
• An opportunity for the representative to tell us about their organisation and what it does in the community, and what they would like to do in the future;
• my colleague would share where she sees alignment between the organisation’s needs and the capacity of social work students. For instance, that organisational policy document that busy staff have not been to get too: a placement student could write the policy and gain invaluable real-world experience.
• I would summarise what I saw to be the advantages for both parties and would agree on next steps. Once an agreement had been reached we would hand it over to the schools placement office to complete paperwork and match students to placements.

Having established our approach my colleague introduced me to the team at the School of Health’s placement office and we were ready to implement.

Over the next four months we put our plan into action. Calls and appointments for were made and successful meetings held. We were surprised and delighted by the enthusiasm with which a wide range of diverse organisations undertook to incorporate students for placements as part of their workforce. In some meetings the organisations saw additional opportunities or a broadening of the scope to include other regions such as Newcastle and Armidale, as well as students from other courses such as nursing and sports science.

Importantly, our efforts were met with success. A number of organisations agreed to take students at the initial meeting or at the follow-up second meeting. This collaboration between Metro Sydney and the School of Health to increase the number of student work experience opportunities was extremely successful. It required only the leveraging of valuable resource of existing community partnerships and networks, and the coordination of meetings.

This small project demonstrates how academics and professional staff can work together in a cross-disciplinary team to solve a university problem. It also delivers on goals of the UNE Strategic Plan for “future fitting lives and communities”:

PERSONALISED LEARNING JOURNEYS – Crafting, adapting and supporting learning journeys that are distinctive in their accessibility and flexibility.

EMPOWERING COMMUNITIES – Creating and sharing knowledge to make a difference locally, regionally and globally.

BUILDING RESILIENCE – Committing to environmental, social and financial resilience for the University, our staff, our students and our communities.