GCCA | Graduate Careers Council of Australia

Graduate Careers Australia

ergo - Number 90 March 2003

Reflections on Ten Years at the Helm

It was predictable enough that I would be asked to write some reflections on my departure after more than a decade with GCCA – but that didn’t make the task any easier! Where to start..? and stop! When I joined the GCCA in 1992, it was unquestionably a watershed period for the organisation. I think the same may be said for 2003, at the time when I take my leave of the Council and gradlink.

Changes to Recruitment

The 1992 recession bit deeply into the graduate labour market in terms of available jobs. It also permanently changed the recruitment landscape. Many firms which had been ‘big employers’ downsized throughout their structure, including at the graduate entry level. Many have never returned to the levels of recruitment experienced in the 1980s. However to balance this, the breadth of the labour market has improved significantly, and not just in terms of small and medium enterprises. In other respects the employer scenario has changed – for example, more companies are now deciding to outsource components of their recruitment effort.

On the other side of the equation, in the early 1990s the graduating population began to experience its sea-change, too. Following the Dawkins higher education reforms, the numbers of graduates grew logarithmically during the ‘90s. The 1992 Graduate Destination Survey reported a survey population of 106,000 graduates. In 2002, the GDS population was 170,000. There have also been significant demographic changes in the graduate population – more women, more mature students, more studying from home and so on.

Quality Assurance

Apart from changes facing the student and employer communities, the Council became an inextricable part of the higher education quality assurance debate, with the arrival of the Course Experience Questionnaire. The CEQ had been on the agenda for some time, and when it was first appended to the GDS for the 1993 survey, arguably the GCCA then entered the mainstream – and it was far from plain sailing. Initially regarded with unease in some quarters, the GCCA had a significant ‘sales’ job over the first couple of years. The original instrument was modified by the GCCA in a number of ways, including the addition of a Generic Skills subscale. The gradual acceptance of the instrument was in part due to its pertinence to the generic skills debate, which loomed large in the early 1990s.

The gradlink Website

So much else has happened over the decade that it is hard indeed to select the highlights. Without doubt, a major milestone resulted from the sudden explosion of Internet use around 1995 – the decision to launch a website called gradlink and to use this as a GCCA brand for other services. While gradlink was formally launched by Minister Vanstone in April 1997, its appearance in 1996 saw gradlink amongst the first electronic services of its type in Australia, and certainly the first site fully dedicated to university students and graduates.

Back in the surveys area, the Postgraduate Research Experience Questionnaire launched in 1999 added yet another element to the suite of survey exercises conducted by GCCA with the assistance of Commonwealth Education Department funding. Like CEQ it found both fear and favour in the higher education community. Meanwhile, GCCA moved further into the e-age, with the development of electronic survey processing systems and most recently the online survey questionnaire.

Over the decade the GCCA’s publications have continued to develop and grow in range and quality. As well as bedrock products such as Graduate Opportunities and the Careers Information Booklet series, there have been new publications of which I think we can be proud, such as the well-received Graduate Recruitment Handbook.

International Links

The GCCA’s involvement with the communities in which it operates has been extensive. I have had the privilege of attending a number of international conferences – in New Zealand, the USA, Canada and Britain. These have not only been instructive but had played a role in attracting international experts to Australia. This was evidenced in the two tripartite conferences in which GCCA joined with AAGE and NAGCAS, to which rewarding numbers of internationals were drawn. Hard work though they undoubtedly were, memories of both Graduates for the New Millennium (Manly, 1999) and The Vital Partnership (Melbourne, 2002) will remain with me for a long time.

And what of the GCCA itself? In this period we physically moved from the splendid but impractical terrace in Barry Street to a larger, ‘shop front’ office on Grattan Street. The staffing level more than doubled, the revenue tripled and the range of products and services grew significantly. Throughout, the GCCA and I have been blessed by incredible support in the human resource area. The Board and its major committees have been tremendously supportive. It would be wrong to attempt to nominate individuals because there are so many I would wish to thank – people who have in many cases maintained their volunteer roles in GCCA structures for many, many years.

The GCCA staff team has been a source of great pride. These days words such as loyalty and dedication are probably regarded as ‘of another world’ to some. But I cheerfully apply them to my own team – and they are what I shall miss most about this wonderful little outfit, the GCCA.