Graduate Careers Australia
Graduate Grapevine - Number 10, Autumn 2008
Application Express Online Tutorial
During the busy graduate recruitment season career practitioners are faced with the challenge of educating large volumes of students about how to write competitive job applications. In addition, most tertiary Careers Services have some form of résumé reviewing/checking service and are faced on a daily basis with documents that contain grammatical errors and common mistakes around the type of content that should be included.
Careers practitioners and employers have all been faced with applications that are not written in plain English, use the passive rather than the active voice, overuse the word ‘I’, contain negative statements and do not address the selection criteria. Letters from international students often reflect their cultural background and are not appropriate for the Australian work environment.
RMIT Career Development & Employment has turned its attention to these issues and has developed an interactive online tutorial to assist RMIT’s 63,000 students write competitive application letters and deal with the challenges of online applications. Application Express is unique in that it addresses the language as well as the content aspects of application writing. The tutorial covers such topics as addressing selection criteria, tone, action verbs plus information on how to structure the letter and deal with online applications. Throughout the tutorial there are practise activities based on sound pedagogical principles that not only show students what they need to do, but also allows them to practise the skills they need to develop.
Application Express Online Tutorial
The tutorial was created using the expertise of careers practitioners and an e-learning developer (Lyn Bond) with an English as a Second Language (ESL) background. By combining the expertise of the two disciplines a unique product was able to be created.
The benefits of having an online tutorial include:
- every student has access to some form of education about writing job applications
- students have access to the resource 24/7, which is an important factor with tight application closing deadlines
- Careers Services can require students to complete the tutorial prior to submitting application letters for checking which reduces the need to deal with common mistakes
- academic staff can easily link this resource to their online learning environment
- academic staff can require students to complete the tutorial when preparing for Work Integrated Learning (WiL) placements or for assessment tasks related to applying for work.
Application Express is also an important resource to assist international students deal with the language and cultural differences when writing applications.
The online tutorial has been rolled out in 2008 and will be evaluated. The next step will be to try to measure whether the tutorial leads to employers receiving better quality applications.
Sally Brooks, Coordinator RMIT Career Development & Employment
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