INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION campusreview. com. au
Work on employability
Students expect universities to provide them with job opportunities; a recent symposium focused on ways to satisfy those demands.
By Phil Honeywood
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development states that more than 4.5 million young people are electing to undertake study outside of their home country each year. While such study is often primarily considered a useful experience to broaden the mind, there are now other motivations. Faced with high levels of youth unemployment, and pressure to provide a return on investment for ever-increasing tuition fees, students now want more than a piece of paper. Some Australian education institutions now recognise that attention needs to be given to employability skills for their domestic and international students. Only recently, however, has this become the priority it needs to be if Australia is to remain a first-choice study destination.
International student surveys consistently highlight a strong expectation that study destination countries, and their education institutions, will provide meaningful courserelated work opportunities. More than 67 per cent of all students graduating from universities in the US can now expect to have at least one substantive paid or unpaid internship during their studies, Austrade has stated. Canada also has a long tradition of providing internship opportunities. In the UK, best-practice universities proactively counsel their international students, early in the first year of their enrolment, about how
to access course-related extra-curricular and part-time work. These universities are now even organising job fairs in their graduating international students’ countries of origin to assist their transition into the workforce back home.
At their annual conference in Adelaide in 2014, the Council of International Students of Australia( CISA) highlighted workplace exploitation, lack of employability skills provision, and the cost and quality of student accommodation as three policy areas where Australia could improve the student experience. The International Education Association of Australia( IEAA) decided to take up the challenge and give these issues more focussed attention. In this context, IEAA hosted a national symposium for International Student Employability in Melbourne on May 15. Rather than have this symposium become just another talkfest, IEAA commissioned three best-practice guides on how international students, education providers and employers can maximise employability skills and opportunities. Attendees then workshopped each of the draft guides at the symposium.
INTERNATIONAL STUDENT EMPLOYABILITY GUIDE
Written by Jo Doyle from Trinity College and sponsored by the Educational Testing Service’ s Test of English as a Foreign Language, this guide focuses on advice to students about starting out, identifying their career goals and homing in on the
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