2018 Focus Areas Showcase

AUDIO: General crowd chatter

TEXT ON SCREEN: RMIT UniversityTEXT ON SCREEN: RMIT UniversityTEXT ON SCREEN: RMIT University

TEXT ON SCREEN: 2018 Focus Areas Showcase

SLIDE ON SCREEN: 2018 FOCUS AREAS

VISUAL: Man - Alex - begins speaking into a microphone in front of a crowd

ALEX PLAYER – DIRECTOR, PLANNING & TRANSFORMATION: Thank you everybody for coming.

Hey look, today is a fantastic opportunity I think for everyone to get a bit more familiar with a lot of the achievements that we've had to date for our areas of focus for 2018.

But also just take a look at what's in store for the rest of 2018, the seven weeks that we've got between now and Christmas.

But most of all, it is a great opportunity for us all to spend some time in each of the stalls, speaking to the focus area leads and just understanding the work that's been achieved this year and what it means for our own portfolios.

But before we get into that, I would like to acknowledge the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the Eastern Kulin nations, on whose unseeded lands we conduct the business of the university.

I respectfully acknowledge their ancestors and elders past and present.

I would also like to acknowledge the traditional custodians and their ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business.

Okay, so today, we've got the different stalls in place.

So we've got four of them, you can see one, two, three,

four, they're all manned by our areas of focus leads for this year.

So I really do encourage you after this session to go and visit each of the stalls and understand what it means for your own portfolios.

So we've got five focus areas this year.

So why don't we sound that out?

So we've got focus area one?

BETHANY PRIDMORE – PROGRAM DIRECTOR, STUDENT BELONGING & EVERY GRADUATE READY: Belonging.

ALEX PLAYER – DIRECTOR, PLANNING & TRANSFORMATION: Focus area two?

BETHANY PRIDMORE – PROGRAM DIRECTOR, STUDENT BELONGING & EVERY GRADUATE READY: Every graduate ready.

ALEX PLAYER-  DIRECTOR, PLANNING & TRANSFORMATION: Focus area three?

NOELEEN CAREY- ORGANISATIONAL DEVELOPMENT MANAGER: Talented and motivated workforce. You lot.

[crowd laughs]

ALEX PLAYER – DIRECTOR, PLANNING & TRANSFORMATION: Focus area four?

PAUL COMESKEY – ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, INDUSTRY ENGAGEMENT: Industry for real.

ALEX PLAYER – DIRECTOR, PLANNING & TRANSFORMATION: Yeah. And focus area five?

JODI FLEMING - PROGRAM DIRECTOR, MAKING GLOBAL WORK: Making global work.

ALEX PLAYER – DIRECTOR, PLANNING & TRANSFORMATION: Unreal. Now each of these focus areas have been doing tremendous work this year, and we're gonna hear, we're going to take five minutes from each of those right now to hear from some of the achievements.

But let me give you just a feel for them. So in focus area one, which is student belonging. We achieved the number one ranking in the International Student Barometer for the Australian Technology Network, the ATN, for the first time ever.

And I can tell you that Beth is standing there on number one on the podium and it feels good to be at number one position. So well done Beth, that's a fantastic achievement for this year.

In focus area two, which is our every graduate ready, you would have heard over the course of the last year or so about micro-credentials and these are the little top-ups that our students can do along their way of their programs.

We've done some work to ensure that the micro-credentials are now part of some of our major programs.

And last year, we had 7500 of our students that experienced those micro-credentials along their way, so that's a massive achievement.

The micro-credentials, I might add, when it comes to micro-credentials we are leading not just in Australia, but we're also leading on a global stage for the work that we're doing with micro-credentials. So well done guys.

Focus area three. So I'll cast your mind back to, I think it might have been June or around winter time, but there was a note that went out to say that RMIT has been recognized as the employer of choice for gender equality, which is something that we are tremendously proud of and kind of wear as a badge, so well done guys.

Focus area four. Some of the work in our industry engagements, we've set up some communities of practice, so that our academic staff and our professional staff alike, can access a lot of the information that's happening across the industries, and really start to rev the engine of industry engagement, which quite frankly, is what we want to differentiate ourselves in the marketplace, so well done.

And finally, focus area five. Across our 12 RMIT locations globally, we've had almost 4000 of our

students that have participated in a non-mobility global experience to date.

There's plenty more that's planned for next year and Jodi's going to tell you a little bit about those in a moment.

So look, what we're going to do now is we're going to spend a couple of minutes and we're going to hear some of the highlights of the work that's taken place in each of those areas of focus, and then there's time afterwards just to socialize.

Please spend time with each of the stalls to really understand what it means for our own portfolios. And I might ask Jodi to kick us off on the global.

TEXT ON SCREEN: FOCUS AREA 5: MAKING GLOBAL WORK

VISUAL: Women - Jodi - begins speaking into a microphone in front of a crowd

JODI FLEMING PROGRAM DIRECTOR – MAKING GLOBAL WORK: So this year we've had a really wide program of work. And our initiatives and programs have focused towards RMIT students, staff and alumni, in all eight locations that RMIT operates. So we have been strengthening the RMIT brand in numerous locations, coordinating our approach.

Strengthening also the global business operations in our priority markets through targeted and sustainable growth. We're also leveraging current opportunities and activities to provide better experiences for prospective, current, and graduated students. And we're increasing global capacity in our students, staff and alumni as well, through a variety of programs and workshops and talks.

So I just wanted to call out some of our key initiatives or some of our highlights this year. There are as you can see, a lot of them, so I'm just going to do a few. So we have done, we're actioning the Vietnam-Melbourne Transition Plan this year, which is assisting to align the bits of work with that.

There's a new partnership being negotiated with Amity in India. So the Pathway Agreement's been co-signed. The Business Annexure, which leads into 16 articulation programs into RMIT, has been signed. And the Global Pricing Agreement and Media and Communication Annexure are currently in with Amity for signing.

So we've also got a partnership we're developing with PMU in India.

RMIT Online have also launched an iOS development with SWIFT in Singapore with Apple, which is huge. They have also been offered, invited to be a registered training partner with SkillsFuture, which is the Singapore Government initiative, so that's just massive. Activator has launched eight MOOCs, which are available to anybody anywhere.

So if you're an Icelandic fisherman with internet access, you can do them. Which is fantastic and they do come with micro-creds as well. And as Alex said, we've had currently 3777 students complete a non-mobility global experience.

The reason that's important is that some students cannot travel because of family, health, or money issues, and so it lets students get capabilities at home on their home campus, which opens up that sort of experience for more students.

So that's pretty cool as well.We have 1332 alumni currently mentoring students globally as well, which is very cool. And Network RMIT is being rolled out to alumni globally.

Network RMIT is kind of a bit like Facebook for alumni, and it creates job opportunities and communications and conversations between alumni wherever they may be, so that's a really cool thing as well. So yep, come and see us to talk about this further 'cause I won't go into all posters.

But yeah, now I'd just like to introduce Anna and Paul from Industry for real, who will take over.

TEXT ON SCREEN: FOCUS AREA 4: INDUSTRY FOR REAL!

VISUAL: Women - Anna - begins speaking into a microphone in front of a crowd

ANNA TAPP PROGRAM DIRECTOR – INDUSTRY FOR REAL!: Hi, my name's Anna Tapp. I am the program director for industry engagement focus area for 2019.

No I didn't get lost, I drew the short straw today I think. So just a bit of a confession, I'm a bit of a, I feel like a bit of an imposter 'cause I only joined the university three and half weeks ago, so I'm probably not the best expert to speak to about the 2018 progress, but that's why Paul's here.

He's going to give you some highlights about some of the things that we've done across this year. I'll just quickly give you a brief overview. So industry for real, obviously supports one of our drivers in our strategic plan, so that's shaping our world.

And we've obviously had a very big year, there's been absolutely lots to celebrate. We've had some great new partnerships with Amazon and NASA through HP.

And there's also been building of longer term relationships and a continuation of those with companies such as Boeing.

There's some really exciting companies that RMIT's working with and it's amazing to hear that there's over 10,000 partnerships that we engage with every single year across a variety of different activities.

So I guess this year has been more about building the foundations for next year, and we've really got those conversations started across the university this year. So because of that connection that we're building

I think we've seen quite a bit of success and progress, so I'll hand over to Paul to tell you about those things.

VISUAL: Man - Paul - begins speaking into a microphone in front of a crowd

PAUL COMESKEY – ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, INDUSTRY ENGAGEMENT: Thank you very much Anna.

So a couple things that we've been working on in 2018 was, as has already been mentioned, really about establishing first of all a community of practice. And the main intention for this community of practice was there's a lot of inherent knowledge across the university in different pockets of the various portfolios, schools, colleges, et cetera.

And it was really about trying to bring some of that consensus and knowledge and information together, so that we can best develop our own internal best practice in terms of how we're going to be engaging with industry moving forward.

So at present, first of all we had to identify how many across the university were I guess, classify their role as being client-facing or industry-facing as a primary part of their role. And we've figured it out that there's around about 200 individuals and that's not to say that there's not a hell of a lot more of us that are engaging with industry,

it's just that these 200 were what we saw as a core structure of that initial community of practice. So that was the first one. The second one was a continuation again of activities that the university has been looking at over the last couple of years, and it was really about deepening and developing our relationships with our clients.

So it was really about putting into place the critical building blocks of which we're going to be moving to into 2019. And a critical part of that was also about how do we capture and document these activities that we're doing?

So as an organization we have some really great examples of how we've engaged with industry, and as just briefly mentioned by Anna, there's a couple of examples right there with Boeing and HP where we've done some really interesting work, but collectively across the university, there's just a wealth of information there.

The issue is that we can't readily access it, so we don't know and we can't leverage it more effectively. So what we've gone about it is embedding in a CRM through Salesforce, which we hope will help bridge that difference in information that's going on, and so that we can all collectively have better access to it.

So that's there and that went live in September this year, so that's really great. And then another critical part was understanding our industry offer.

Again, we have so many offers available and we have so many different products and so many different variations of it, so a crucial work that has been done was around reviewing and refining what and how we can best connect and offer these products to our industry partners, and this includes in as many forms, broader student experiences, graduate opportunities, scholarships, research, and we're still working on it now and predominantly this is a key part of what we're doing because it's going to be critical for us to go out to market with a succinct offer to our industry partners, 'cause that's what they're demanding.

So our focus for 2018 has really been about laying the groundwork to help shift the bar, and identifying what needs to be done as we move into 2019.

Thank you. And I'd like to just pass you over now to Noeleen Carey.

TEXT ON SCREEN: FOCUS AREA 3: TALENTED AND MOTIVATED WORKFORCE

VISUAL: Women - Noeleen - begins speaking into a microphone in front of a crowd

NOELEEN CAREY- ORGANISATIONAL DEVELOPMENT MANAGER: Our focus is obviously about you. And our vision for focus area three is to create an environment within the university where all of our staff can be their best.

So our key areas of focus are basically fall into three. Which is creating an effective organization for us to work within, to support performance and capability, and to create an environment of diversity and inclusion.

So in our language, in organizational development, it's basically building capability capacity, connectedness, and that will ultimately create our culture.

So our key achievements for 2018, especially around our effective organization, is we have an new enterprise bargaining agreement, where we had a 95% yes vote from our talented and motivated workforce. And it's currently sitting with Fair Work and we're hoping to hear very, very soon the ratification of it.

[applause from crowd]

Understanding our workforce structure was also very important so we have all colleges and portfolios and schools have created a workforce plan, and that's going to continuously to evolve but it's going to be able to help us design our operating plans going forward.

Key area of focus is obviously supporting our people in their performance and career. We have enhanced our capability frameworks to now include not only leadership but education and research and professional capabilities. Foundation number one for us.

So there's brochures here so please take them.

We're designing capability programs to enable the achievement of these skills for today and the skills for tomorrow. We're enhancing our systems so that we can make it easier for us to be having those performance and career conversations with our leaders, so we can track our successes.

But also so that we can collate our objectives for 2019 and beyond, to be able to achieve the skills that we're looking for.

The be ready leadership program is continuing to roll out and in conjunction, 'cause collaboration is one of our fundamental beliefs, we're working with Industry For Real in taking our leaders out into industry to learn around how other organizations work and bring those learnings back into the university.

And to truly support our philosophy of lifelong learning, in conjunction with Global and a number of other bodies, we have launched some micro-credentials. So it's not just for staff, sorry students, it's going to be for staff as well.

And we've released a half a dozen of them in the last week including agile ways of working and bundyi-girri. And finally, our diversity to inclusion, critical to how, to living our values and living our beliefs. Our goal is to in fact move away from diversity and inclusion, to inclusion.

And I had the most beautiful description given to me by someone who joined us in a cultural leadership experience program last week.

"Diversity is being invited to the dance, inclusion is being asked to dance."

So there's been some major achievements which Alex has already made reference to, and that is our gold employee status with the Australian Workforce Equity, which is an amazing achievement considering it's really only built up in the last two years.

Our employer of choice for gender equality, which of course is critical to our attracting and retaining our staff. And we are now a key contributor to the Australian Network on Disability.

So we've done amazing work across the university and obviously we're concentrating very heavily in our STEM area to support that.

So now I'd like to hand over to Beth to give an update on focus area one and two.

TEXT ON SCREEN:

FOCUS AREA 1: STUDENT BELONGING

FOCUS AREA 2: EVERY GRADUATE READY

VISUAL: Women - Beth - begins speaking into a microphone in front of a crowd

BETHANY PRIDMORE – PROGRAM DIRECTOR, STUDENT BELONGING & EVERY GRADUATE READY: Hi, welcome to belonging and every graduate ready.

So we have two focus areas. We have eight initiatives that run underneath them, but we have one purpose, and that is to put the student experience at the heart of everything we do.

Now to make this a living breathing reality this year, we've had teams working across the education portfolio, the three colleges, the operations team, the strategy policy and impact team, the alumni team, all coming together to work cross-functionally in different parts of our programs.

So what does this mean in practice?

So for belonging, we know belonging has five key drivers, right?

We know this because it originated out of a research project in DSC and we've spent the last couple of years seeking to make that research and that strategy a practical reality.

So some of the things we've done are around looking at our largest programs and looking at where we have natural points of connection to our students and our staff and actually what we can do to enhance belonging in these five key drivers.

So we've held a series of workshops, we've got I think it's over 185 different initiatives running across our largest programs, all designed to increase students' sense of belonging.

Because we know when you belong, you feel part of something. You belong to your community,

you belong to your discipline, and it makes learning a really fun, enjoyable experience, which is what we're here to do.

Some of our other achievements, is we've improved retention by 2%. Now, for an organization this size, thank you for nodding, it's a great achievement isn't it?

But it sounds really dry.

But we know education's a life changer, and if you can stay at uni, you change your life. So that 2% represents students who are staying to finish their education, which is phenomenal.

We've stood up new clubs across the breadth of our organization, tailored to specific cohorts with specific needs and specific desires.

You know, Alex mentioned the number one on the IBS, that is because we did a phenomenal amount of work on international student journey, and addressed their points of pain, for joining RMIT, and it's paid dividends.

Scattered in the room, I can see the teams from SLAMs and industry mentoring, these guys have done a phenomenal amount of work this year, standing up and scaling our mentoring programs.

Then we move to every graduate ready, which is about curriculum, alright?

So there's kind of three main areas here, there's the creds which Alex referred to.

In addition to the creds that we've embedded in the programs, we also have open creds which students are flocking to. The numbers are stupendous. It's over 21,000 people who are doing creds. 'Cause students know they need to leave with soft skills, that's what industry's asking from them and that is how they're educating themselves.

We've also agreed program principles, which will be the foundational components of what an RMIT program is known for. There are eight of them, it's not a pop quiz question, we thought that was a bit mean, but if you'd like to know more about the program principles, come and talk to us.

But we've spent a large chunk of this year debating them, they're orientated in research, and then we've also started seeking to implement them.

The other things we've done in our largest 44 programs is we're looking to increasing authentic assessment. With the apologies to the academics in the room, that means the death of the multi-choice exam question, right?

But it means that the assessment and the learning you are doing, orientates you in the discipline and in the work that you will do with your degree.

We sought to stand up and improve our industry advisory boards, so that we're really bringing industry into the heart of our programs.

And from Judy's point of view, will. Working to graded learning. How we're doing this in a meaningful way so our students leave with the experience that they need, the skills they would like, and that they're ready for life and work.

So on that note, I'm going to hand back to Alex, who's gonna sort of do the final wrap up.

VISUAL: Man - Alex - begins speaking into a microphone in front of a crowd

ALEX PLAYER – DIRECTOR, PLANNING & TRANSFORMATION: Thank you.

[crowd applause]

Well done everybody.

What we've just done is a speed skate over the top of some of the great achievements of the focus areas for 2018.

But what I would encourage everyone to do now is to seize the moment and just start to dive

 a little bit deeper with the areas of focus leads and if I'd give you one hot tip for a question, just ask what does all that mean and how can I take on all of that for our own portfolios?

So I really encourage you to immerse yourself in all five of our focus areas.

Thanks again for coming, and Happy Halloween.

[crowd laughter and applause]

ALEX PLAYER – DIRECTOR, PLANNING & TRANSFORMATION: Thank you.