GCCA | Graduate Careers Council of Australia

Graduate Careers Australia

The Graduate Grapevine – Number 3, March 2006

All the Advantages of Curtin Advantage

Today’s employers are demanding work-ready graduates and despite many other demands on their limited resources, Australia’s universities are endeavouring to deliver. The problem is that the majority of university courses have no formalised practical programs in place to compliment their degree programs. With little funding and only limited business support, what can a forward-thinking institution, wishing to implement such a program, do?

Tracey Hodgkins, who developed and initiated the Curtin Advantage program at Perth’s CurtinUniversity, believes her program may be the answer for institutions seeking to give their graduates the edge in a competitive marketplace. Advantage is a program which runs within a company structure, offering students the chance to participate at a range of levels, including as executives.

The individual units offer internships that run on a four-monthly cycle, with succession planning built in to hand over to incoming participants. Business units in the company develop and promote their own projects, recruit people to staff them and are responsible for their own performance. Ms Hodgkins said having students working on real projects was one of the strengths of Advantage. Students have worked on projects including an Innovation Centre and Tourism Monitor for Latvia, entrepreneurial education camps competitions and events and research and development with companies like Motorola. After each cycle students can either stay with the project, swap to another for a different experience or graduate from the program. Students also have the opportunity to apply for promotions in the company to management positions. Each business unit has a board of business and community advisors made up of industry heads of various sectors. As is the case with any corporate entity, there is a requirement to report upwards. Business units can also tap into fully developed projects running both nationally and internationally

The program is run via a not-for-profit company, managed and staffed by student volunteers and overseen by expert personnel. Up to 100 student volunteers work in the company’s various departments, including marketing, finance and IT. Every student who has completed the program has been successful in subsequently finding employment.

Ms Hodgkins established Advantage after realising that the Business degree she was undertaking lacked the industry-standard practical experience she wanted. CurtinUniversity backed the plan Ms Hodgkins had first proposed in 2001, and since then Curtin Advantage has grown from a program involving 13 Business students to a campus-wide option that has involved more than 5000 graduates.

After five successful years and many awards and accolades later, the program is now being offered nationally. The program has won Young Achievement Australia state and national awards for its business plans, overall company success, innovation and marketing. Curtin Advantage students also, won the prestigious Students in Free Enterprise competition in Barcelona in 2004, making Australia the first country other than the US to win the SIFE World Cup in 29 years.

 “Research has shown that experiential learning is an extremely important and beneficial way of gaining knowledge,” Ms Hodgkins said. “Powerful learning occurs through experiencing something firsthand, then reflecting on that experience. Advantage allows and encourages students to participate in every component of business, including making mistakes. Advantage is such a simple yet effective program. Once a few basic elements are put in place it can easily be managed by just one staff member – the students do the rest, while gaining, of course, management and a range of other skills along the way.”

So for both students and employers, Advantage is delivering results. For more information about participating in the Advantage program contact Tracey Hodgkins on (08) 9266 3023 or via email at [email protected] . For further examples of innovative Advantage programs, go to www.advantage.edu.au/student/projects.php .

Curtin Advantage in Action in Latvia

In 2003, after a phone call from a former Curtin graduate working in the Stockholm School of Economics who had read about the work she was doing, Tracey visited Latvia. Once there she began work on a whole of country project.

Latvian youth tend to leave the country as soon as they are able, and as result there is certain a lack of enterprise development which has been detrimental to the country’s economic future. Also, morale has been low within certain sections of the younger members of the Latvian community. After touring the country, speaking to large numbers of the country’s youth, Tracey decided that the only way forward was to develop projects in conjunction with our students to work on changing this culture.

The Latvian program is now in its fifth iteration and has worked on a number of key projects for developing regional Latvia. Advantage now has a Tourism Monitor, cultural research and change programs, an Innovation Centre in development and a youth program. All designed and implemented by students and mentored by Latvians and Australians.