Graduate Attribute 12
Facilitate the ability of graduates to participate with confidence in the future workforce as capable and sustainable practitioners.
Capability, sustainability and workforce readiness are strands that are woven throughout the fabric of my career over the past 15 years, particularly through different aspects of my roles as a career practitioner and also more recently as a tertiary educator.
What is the Triple Bottom Line?
The Career Practice strands
As a career practitioner, a very large part of my work with clients involves enabling them to build and further develop self-knowledge - in particular, knowledge about their strengths, values, personality traits, goals and dreams. This knowledge is central to finding meaning and direction in one's career.
Good accurate self-knowledge is also crucial in the development of effective career management skills such as Job Search, CV writing, and Interview Skills (aka Employability Skills).
As a career practitioner I fully realise the importance of such skills and include them into my teaching where possible. I also advocate for their inclusion in other teaching programmes, for example, in Semester 2, 2015 I offered and delivered a session on Employability Skills for the Year 2 BSS students. One of the students tracked me down a few days later and said that he had been able to put his updated inteview skills to immediate use - he had an interview for a work placement and was successful in gaining the role.
The Teaching Strands
As an educator with a strong learner-centred element to my philosophy (see Teaching Philosophy theme 1), I am interested not only in the transfer of knowledge and skills but also in facilitating people to develop capabilities as a lifelong and self-directed, self-managing learners.These are the very same capabilities that will help those learners to build and maintain capable and sustainable careers. In this area, Career Practice and Teaching are one.
The Environmental Strands
In the Student Leadership Programme at AUT, sustainability was a central component - notably in the community projects that the students undertook as part of the programme (see the Community Projects section of Case Study 2 for more info on this).
In researching the theoretical elements of this programme, I was introduced to the concept of the Triple Bottom Line developed by John Elkington (1998) which advocates that companies should measure their success not only in terms of financial profit, but also in terms of social responsibility and environmental responsibility - giving us the three P's of the triple bottom line, Profit, People and Planet. I am pleased to see much of this in policies and processes at Otago Polytechnic.
As a result of all the above strands, practising and working in a sustainable manner and enabling my students to do likewise is a natural and important part of my professional and personal life.