Public Health Career Development Action Plan: Post Graduate Student Career Development Support and Learning Activities for the Discipline of Public Health and Tropical Medicine
Other Publication ResearchOnline@JCUAbstract
A feature of university study, including postgraduate study, is to move into and within the labour force, and obtain meaningful employment. As such, universities and students are keen to ensure employability is embedded into curriculum. The discipline of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at James Cook University has a large postgraduate cohort and represents about 19% of the university’s postgraduate students in 2018. This report outlines the stages in the creation of a career development action plan for the discipline of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. An audit of existing employability related content within subjects was undertaken and from this a consideration of opportunities for extension within curriculum informed by the action plan components. An antecedent to these considerations which informed the proposed next steps is that understanding student motivation for enrolment is an important pre-requisite for directing career and employability into curriculum. A model has been created to reflect the proposed interactions between student motivation, career development, adaptability and employability; although more work is required to determine whether this model fits the postgraduate student journey. The JCU Career Action Plan for Curriculum (CAP-C) is an online planning tool developed by the JCU Careers and Employability Team to assist staff in boosting career development, employability and entrepreneurship learning strategies and activities into curriculum. The CAP-C was developed with a focus on undergraduate courses and as such a slightly modified CAP-C was used for exploring employability within a postgraduate specific cohort. This modified CAP-C was used to audit a selection of subject offerings within public health and tropical medicine. Each subject offering was considered against 29 action points from the CAP-C that were seen by the project team as being relevant to postgraduate study. Additional points of reflection, for staff who were completing the audit, related to perceived value and how time intensive embedment activities would be for those action points not already embedded. A total of 24 subjects of the 39 available were audited. Key findings were that career and employability content was embedded into some subjects, although the included content varied depending on the subject focus and also by delivery mode. Career and employability related content that already exists relates to a provision of staff career snapshots, problem based activities, use of professional online networks , assessment items which establish knowledge acquisition and build practical skills relevant to potential future work situations. Examples of best practice for these existing embedded action points are outlined. A number of key action items for the discipline of Public Health and Tropical Medicine are outlined including to boost student networking and communication opportunities, clearly articulate the employment services available, to enable past students to illustrate their career trajectory after graduation and their associated tips and thoughts on success. Key opportunities for future enhancement relate to promoting practical skill acquisition, showing the diversity of career paths and trajectories in public health, encouraging student networking during and post study. A number of easy actions can be undertaken without creating additional workloads but provide value. Examples include supporting students to explore opportunities and to be future orientated, promote communication within and beyond subjects and to highlight the relevance of the material with respect to careers and future work related roles. Through undertaking an audit of current examples of embedding of employability and career content in the postgraduate Public Health and Tropical Medicine offerings it was determined that a number of existing actions are being undertaken. There is always room for improvement, but importantly these actions need not be time intensive for staff to implement to have value. Some key action points for the discipline have been articulated as well as some Meta considerations regarding strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats with respect to the disciplines engagement and championing of employability and career embedment. It is hoped that through this audit process it will lead to improvements for the disciplines’ students (current and future) but also might offer some insights for other disciplines.
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35
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James Cook University
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Townsville, QLD, Australia
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