international education
campusreview.com.au
A global mind
Why we should be doing more to
promote global experiences.
By Julian O’Shea and Kaia Myers-Stewart
T
he concept of graduate employability has become one of
utmost importance for universities and their students in Australia
and beyond, and yet, despite the ever-increasing resources and
energy being poured into ensuring employability is achieved through a
university degree, it is a difficult concept to unpack.
What does it really mean? Is employability a characteristic of
students who have the most or the best technical knowledge
in their field, or those who come across better at interviews as a
result of the soft skills and collaborative mindset they have accrued
over the course of their university career? For that matter, does
employability come down to what you know or who you know?
After all, 75–85 per cent of jobs in Australia are not advertised,
so it stands to reason that those with the richest social networks
will enjoy the greatest opportunity for employment. In truth, it’s
probably a little bit of all of the above, combined together in
varying ratios depending on who the student is, what they are
studying, where they are studying, and how they internalise what
they are being taught.
An added layer of complexity to the employability conundrum
is the reality that, as the world becomes increasingly more
interconnected across borders, the skills required for graduate
employment become ever more multifaceted and nuanced and
tend to skew much further to the importance of interpersonal skills.
For example, if a fresh-faced graduate has never travelled before,
or has never worked closely with anyone from outside of their
culture, they may not be considered a strong candidate by a global
firm that values intercultural competence or high-level perspective
taking and conflict management skills over a high GPA.
So, how can we ensure that university students are leaving their
institutions with the optimal skill sets for the global workplace?
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The experience of Joshua Barker, a consultant for the Global
Business Services team at IBM, provides an example of how this
can be done.
In 2016, Joshua went on a global education program to Vietnam
with Unbound, a social enterprise specialising in overseas work
integrated learning (WIL) experiences for university students. The
program enabled Joshua to put his theoretical classroom knowledge
into practice for the first time, and it began Joshua’s journey to
upskilling as an engineer, an entrepreneur and as a manager.
Joshua went on to become a project manager for the
organisation until his graduation and subsequent entry into
IBM in 2018.
This example showcases the ideal outcome of post-secondary
WIL programs while also highlighting an interesting perspective
about international WIL placements in particular: not only are
remarkable students often attracted to overseas opportunities,
they are also appropriately challenged and stimulated by them.
The unfamiliar context, the lack of resources commonly provided
for problem-solving in Australia, all of the cultural complexities
associated with integrating into a different community, each of
these factors provides a steeper learning curve on which students
can truly test their abilities and potential, ultimately enabling them
to set themselves apart from their growing cohort of fellow young
job seekers.
In a rapidly changing world filled with fast-paced technology and
jobs that didn’t exist even two years ago, adaptability to uncertainty,
problem-solving and agile-thinking are highly sought after in the
global race for top talent.
We know that overseas programs can be the spark that lights
resilience, flexibility and passion in our next generation of leaders,
so should we be doing more to promote global experiences?
In many ways, the policy setting is positive here in Australia:
OS-HELP (interest and fee-free loan program) is one of the most
innovative funding mechanisms for overseas study around the
world, and the ongoing success of the New Colombo Plan
initiative is supporting travel in the Indo-Pacific region.
Whatever the barriers may be, a university’s commitment to
providing students with meaningful, valuable learning experiences
in the global work landscape could mean a graduating class filled
with young people brimming with possibility, resourcefulness,
talent and, ultimately, employability. ■
Julian O’Shea and Kaia Myers-Stewart are from Unbound
(www.unbound.edu.au).