GCCA | Graduate Careers Council of Australia

Graduate Careers Australia

ergo - Number 89 December 2002

Full House at Recent Postgraduate Futures Symposium

With well over 600 postgraduate students in attendance, the recent Postgraduate Futures Symposium, held at The University of Melbourne on Friday 11 October, displayed how successfully careers services can work together to present combined events. Coordinated by the Victorian Branch of the National Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services (NAGCAS), the aim of the Postgraduate Futures Symposium was to provide postgraduate students from any Victorian university with career planning information and job seeking information and strategies.

Speakers Cover a Range of Issues

Over the space of three hours, a range of speakers appeared in both plenary and workshop sessions to discuss topics such as:

• Postgraduate employment outcomes
• Managing an academic career
• Intellectual property
• Networking for success
• Entrepreneurship – Starting your own business
• Behavioural interviews
• Postgraduate résumés
• Tapping into the global employment market

Representing both industry and education, the speakers came from a diverse array of organisations including Monash University, University of Melbourne, Furmanite Australia, Software Engineering Australia, Australian Graduate School of Entrepreneurship (Swinburne University of Technology), Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Robert Walters, ANZ Bank and the GCCA.

Postgrads Gain Further Information

It was impressive to see the interest the event had generated amongst the 600 plus students in attendance as they moved quickly between sessions to ensure that they didn’t miss any of the vital information on offer. During the breaks, students also visited the numerous information stands in the foyer and seized opportunities to mingle with the guest speakers and ask further questions. Clearly, postgraduate students are keen to seek out career planning and job search advice, and also to learn about strategies which will help them either launch or further their careers as a result of their studies. gradlink was pleased to be involved as the major sponsor of the inaugural Postgraduate Futures Symposium and we hope that this is the first of many similar events to come. Congratulations to NAGCAS (Vic) and all involved on the excellent outcome – it was a great achievement to have a full house on a Friday night!

Selected presentations from the Postgraduate Futures Symposium can be found in the Postgraduate Futures Symposium section of this site.