Campus Review Vol 29. Issue 11 | November 2019 | Seite 21

industry & research
campusreview.com.au
you to move across different industries –
become really important.
As for what I would recommend to uni
students, I would ask them to think about
their choice of degree now, not as the big
decision about what your career is going to
be, but to think of it more as a first step.
I was speaking to a colleague of mine in
journalism the other day and he was saying
that they get young journalists coming
through now who see themselves as early
career journalists. They come in with this
mindset that they’ll only do it for a few
years. They’ll try and get some useful skills
out of it – presenting, communication,
make some good networks – but they have
this mindset that they’re going to move on.
And we’re seeing lots of universities
jumping on board this micro-credential
trend. So, you might just do essentially one
subject, maybe over two weeks online, and
get a thing to add to your CV, in written
communication or whatever it might be.
We’re going to see a lot more of that.
What kinds of factors do students weigh up
when making course decisions? I assume
salary would be one thing, but what else?
couple of different companies but staying
in the one industry, now the prediction
is that young people will have 17 distinct
jobs over their working life, across five
different careers. So it’s a much less linear
career pathway.
As a consequence, lifelong learning
is going to become the norm. People
will have to retrain and upskill as part of
their jobs, but also in additional higher
education. And we’ll see more of this
as work is transformed by automation
and people have to move into different
industries.
Recently I saw an interesting study
commissioned by Google Australia – a
report about the skills Australian workers
will need to develop in the future. It said
Australians are going to need frequent
training across their career to adjust to the
future of work. That could be on-the-job
training, but it could also be formal training,
maybe not a whole degree but a short
course. The report predicted that by 2040,
Australian workers will need to spend
an additional three hours per week on
average in education and training. If you
compare that to today, that represents a
33 per cent increase across their lifetime.
So, transferable skills – the kind that allow
There are a number of things. You’re right
that salary – or at least getting a job, or
feeling secure that you are going to find a
job – is probably the most important one.
In terms of what influences them, I’ve
already talked about them wanting to
‘spend’ the ATAR and get the most out
of their hard work. But in terms of what’s
influencing that decision, we know from
the research that parents and peers are
the biggest influence, and obviously
different families are going to have different
expectations about their children’s career
paths, and different families will have
different perceptions about which university
is acceptable to go to.
The research shows that students are
really influenced by this. I guess one
consequence of that is you get students
following what their parents expect, not
necessarily what they’d like to do. And of
course the kind of family you grow up in,
whether it’s a low SES family or a high SES
family, whether your parents went to uni
or not, what your friends plan to do. All of
this will have a big influence on the kind
of horizons students have about what’s
possible and how they set their goals.
Other voices that are important include
careers practitioners and discipline teachers
within schools. So you might have a history
teacher that encourages you to go down
that path.
Also, practical things like geographical
location play a part, and not just for people
in regional areas but also those in capital
cities. How easy is it going to be for you to
get back and forth across the city?
And I just saw something in the paper
the other day saying that when students
are researching different unis, two-thirds
of them are now using social media, like
the La Trobe Facebook account, where
students are posting about what university
life is like. And prospective students are
more likely to go to that kind of thing than
to open days. So that’s an interesting shift.
One other important thing to say is
that it’s going to vary a lot by the type of
course they’re doing. So, the motivation
for someone choosing nursing versus
someone choosing engineering versus
someone choosing arts is going to
be different.
The research that I’ve done has been
into why Bachelor of Arts students choose
their course. We did a study at La Trobe
on 400 of our arts students. And they’re
a pretty interesting group because a large
proportion of them describe their choice to
do arts as following their passion.
And we found in this that they’ll often
meet resistance from their family because
there’s a perception that an arts degree
is not career-focused enough. But these
students tend to have a strong belief that
they’ll do well if they do what they like. And
We’re seeing lots of
universities jumping on board
this micro-credential trend.
some of them do have a specific career
in mind, but others are just following their
interests to see where it will go.
We also found that a proportion of these
students see the arts degree as a means of
self-discovery and exploration. They hope
they can find themselves within it in the
same way that a gap year is sometimes
understood. And if you think about the
advice that’s often given to students about
doing an arts degree, it’s often the thing
that students get told to do if they don’t
know, if they’re not sure.
So, start with arts, and explore. They’re a
pretty interesting cohort. ■
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