Graduate Careers Australia
ergo - Number 97 Dec 2004 - Feb 2005
Higher Education Workplace Skills Olympiad (HEWSO) Spring Program Debuts in 2004
Di Rachinger, regional project officer for the 2004 HEWSO Spring Program, talks about the event which concluded recently:
The HEWSO (Higher Education Workplace Skills Olympiad) Summer program, run successfully over the last four years, has produced an offshoot! During the week of 27 September – 1 October 2004, the inaugural HEWSO Spring program ran with 12 universities, 32 teams and 194 students taking part.
HEWSO is a national project, initiated and conducted by the National Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services (NAGCAS) and partly funded by the Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST). It provides experiential learning in a competition framework, and its benefits include career education and the development of employability skills and generic attributes. HEWSO also informs employers about the potential of students completing degrees in Australian universities.
HEWSO Summer, the original HEWSO program, runs for a month over January/February; however some university Careers Services felt that this format did not suit all participants, particularly regional campuses as many of their students return home over the summer. To rememdy this, HEWSO Spring was established.
The twelve universities who participated in the inaugural Spring HEWSO were Flinders University from South Australia; Deakin, Monash, Victoria, RMIT, Swinburne and Ballarat Universities from Victoria; QUT, Queensland, Southern Queensland and James Cook universities from Queensland and Murdoch University from Western Australia. The host employers represented a huge cross-section of industries including City of Marion Council, Coles Myer, Dept of Premier and Cabinet, Masterfoods, Young Achievement Australia, Defence Force Recruiting, the Australian Institute of Marine Science, Brisbane City Council, Arnotts, Telstra and Foodland Associated Ltd.
The problems set really stretched the students, due to the complexity of the issues involved and the short time frame they were confined to. Host employers provided a briefing, outlining both the problem and the organisation itself to ensure the teams understood the context. The students then had to prepare their response to the issue and formulate a 20 minute presentation and written report. At judging time, the teams presented their findings to the host employers, who then filled out a scoresheet for each team, based on the Employability Skills Framework. The teams’ presentations were also videoed, and winners moved on to the national competition.
The national judging involved a representative from each of three key stakeholders groups: NAGCAS (Martin Smith), The Business Council of Australia (Maria Tarrant) and the AAGE (Jill Carter). Judges watched the team videos, read the reports and filled out scoresheets (all independently) then convened by teleconference to compare notes. Eventually it was determined that the winner of “Best Report” was the Flinders University team; “Best Presentation” was won by the team from the Queensland University of Technology, and the University of Southern Queensland team came up with the “Most Creative Solution.” Congratulations to those winners!
I would like to thank everyone who participated and made the inaugural HEWSO Spring such a success; your energy and enthusiasm assisted greatly. HEWSO Spring is to be evaluated, and it is hoped will once again take place in 2005. Meanwhile, enjoy HEWSO Summer!
Di Rachinger
Regional Project Officer, HEWSO
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