Recently Engineers Australia has had the opportunity to participate in a number of events aimed at supporting student and graduate members, as well as events aimed at influencing high school students in their subject selections for the South Australian Certificate of Education and ultimately for university course entry.
The EA Masterclass event, delivered in conjunction with EA’s Tertiary and Careers team, saw approximately 60 student and graduate members take advantage of a great development opportunity.
Held in August 2018, participants rotated through sessions on networking, addressing selection criteria for job advertisements and responding to interview questions with confidence and poise.
Run over a period of two hours, volunteers and EA staff were run off their feet! Thanks go to Lucie Reilly of EA, and to our wonderful volunteers – Enyo Agbodo, Michelle Bright, Mark Brownley, Tom Gouldie, Gordan Lesicar, Ying Luo, Emily Mboya, Ethan Moore, Niki Robinson, Hayley Rohrlach and Trevor Zwar. Without volunteers these events don’t happen, and we know from a post event survey that the work done by these volunteers was highly regarded – overall, the event was rated an average 8.5 (on a 1-10 scale) – great outcome!
The Career Expos at Blackfriars Priory and Seaton High School were wonderful opportunities to engage young people at a stage when their subject selections are critical. Armed with a range of Commonwealth Government career guidance material, career ‘bullseyes’, employment outlook data and occupational projections combined with engineering course pre-requisites and our own developed matrix of areas of study vis-à-vis engineering roles, the expos were a great success.
It was great to engage young students and their parents. It was particularly beneficial to be able to demonstrate the diversity of opportunity where these young people elect to take on Specialist Mathematics, Mathematical Methods and Physics at this developmental stage of their education.
For those of us who attended and participated it was particularly positive to see a strong gender balance in those showing interest in the right subjects and a range of engineering outcomes.
When you see these opportunities promoted through Engineers Australia, please give serious consideration to participating – you’ll be surprised by how gratifying this can be! It would be remiss of us not to recognise the direct involvement of a couple of our graduate ambassadors at the Seaton High School event, many thanks to Akash Saini and Niyo Samwel.