Building Learning Ventures for Students’ Future-Readiness

Abstract

This chapter presents how a centralized student support unit at an Australian university interconnects their academic language and career development learning services with an overall university and industry ecology to build learning ventures for students’ future success, with a narrow focus on the present popular theme in universities around the world: employability. The vision for student success is based on student development worldviews and guided by an ontologically similar employability model. The unit strongly believes that it is the responsibility of a higher education provider to create and sustain educational opportunities and conditions to every enrolled student who has made a decision to attend the selected university, sometimes overcoming personal trials and barriers to enroll. Once enrolled, it is the responsibility of these higher education institutions to facilitate these students’ educational endeavors by creating, building, and sustaining meaningful educational opportunities and conditions that future-proof them for a supercomplex world after they graduate. Only when the educational opportunities and conditions are fertile with learning ventures connected to the world of work, and embedded into their learning and teaching environments, would their student experiences and student engagement be lifted and would they become lifelong learning-ready, thus future proofing them for realities of work that might not be immediately known, or even for careers that may be beyond their study choice. When students enter their first employment after graduation, it will not always be aligned with their studies or degree they had pursued at university. This chapter presents narratives of how a newly established centralized student support, co-curricular unit, known as Student Academic and Career Success (SACS), facilitates student future learning capabilities when work integrated learning (WIL), a curricular approach to enhance employability, resides within academic faculties but is governed by a separate centralized unit that only focuses on WIL. The first section introduces the intentional theoretical framework that underpins the unit’s operation as a way to bring together the different educational approaches and worldviews that exist within the university. The second section presents a portfolio of future-readiness programs and initiatives as exemplars. This section is narrated by colleagues themselves who are responsible for delivering the programs and initiatives.