Lucinda Crossley Meates from Job Smart Edge
Biography of the speaker
Lucinda Crossley Meates graduated with a Bachelor of Commerce in Economics, Marketing and Human Resource Management from the University of Sydney. After exploring different roles in commercial recruitment and government-funded career support for school students, she returned to the University of Sydney as a Career Education Officer and Careers Service Manager. She is now involved in several initiatives improving student experience and creating student employability programs embedded in academic curricula. Lucinda is now heading the operations of Job Smart Edge, a large-scale employability skill accelerator for international students at the University of Sydney.
Question 1: The University of Sydney has recently launched Job Smart Edge, an employability program that aims to equip students with the key skills needed to thrive in the current ever-changing job market. Can you tell us more about the program?
LCM: Job Smart is the University of Sydney Business School’s flagship student experience and employability skill program for our cohort of over 9400 international students. It is delivered on a customised, mobile first and gamified education technology platform provided by our partner Practera and it is structured as a 3 phased program of employability skill building activities, corporate networking and genuine workplace projects with Australian employers. In Phase 1, Job Start, we provide a gamified, social 10 step program for students to build employability awareness, fundamental skills through a nano-industry project and volunteering experience and developing career assets such as CV’s & LinkedIn profiles. In Phase 2, Job Smart, we run virtual team-based work simulations themed on Resilience, Influence, Negotiation & Cultural competency to develop teamwork & communication skills. In Phase 3, Job Ready, we simulate graduate recruitment process with personalised feedback and coaching loops.
Our program is targeted at a very specific cohort: our group of international students, with Chinese scholars making up the greatest proportion of that group. These students have unique needs, particularly when coming to Australia with limited professional experience; however, they show great aspirations and career goals. If you layer the cultural and hiring-market barriers on top of that, you can imagine how difficult adjusting to a new country might be for them. Winding back to 2015, we welcomed a new Dean. He arrived with a very clear intent to make a mark. He identified that the group of international students needed more support and resources and from there everything happened very quickly. In the space of a few months, we were given green light and funding to create a program to support this group. The Dean gave us a blank page for the design, and they regarded our teams as the full experts in executing the plan. With funding arriving in late 2015 and the launch date in the first months of 2016, we only had 4 months to get something ready. As you can imagine, the timing was very tight, but the goal was clear. We had to move immediately. The wonderful thing was that career services at universities have always been regarded as the cottage industry on the side; employability was for everyone but there were very few resources to power it. The sudden funding that came through gave us the chance to buy in all the tools we needed to take all the concepts we’d always wanted to offer from idea to realisation. We had resources to allocate to wherever we needed to create something sticky in a noisy market. In the semester prior to Job Smart launch, we had 40 students signing up to the initiative. In the first pilot semester we had 766 students: a 20x increase in students’ participation! The sudden student uptake gave us a sense of purpose and it showed us that the appetite was there!
ZV: This is brilliant! We love to see how a university took a risk to create something completely new and innovative. It must have been incredible to have that user validation right from the get-go!
LCM: It really was. Fast forwarding to this year, COVID obviously impacted us and more specifically the international students given the Australian border closure; most of our students are indeed stuck abroad. Instead of being conservative in times of dropped enrolments, our leadership prioritised this student segment. We received green light again for upgrading Job Smart and Job Smart Edge was created. We needed a new team to come together and create a new, online and improved version of Job Smart. Semester 2 of 2020 was the first time we ran Job Smart Edge: we took the aspects of Job Smart that students enjoyed the most and those that brought the most value in outcomes and professional development (mainly industry touchpoints such as networking, projects, etc.) and we scaled them up. We moved everything online and ensured accessibility, no matter where the student was in the world. This included converting our high quality industry projects and internships with our vendor partners at Practera and Readygrad. We consolidated industry contacts in the Business School, and we partnered with alumni and other business professors to expand the network. Normally, we would use projects in a reward-based setting, but for Job Smart Edge we incorporated them as part of the program; everyone was able to do one. A new full credit unit of study option was created from our Work-Integrated Learning Hub , which ensures that students have the option of choosing to have the experience counts towards the students’ degree.
ZV: What a great story. What really struck me in your story is the importance of having good leadership: if you have the right mission and vision at heart from the higher ranks of your institution, everything flows much easier. Obviously, you need the resources and a fantastic team to deliver, but I find those two points are essential.
LCM: That’s spot on. I started seeing what people were doing in this space nearly a decade ago. I was excited and super interested in these models and, although I am not a super tech-y person myself, I appreciate its power. I saw platforms like this at a couple of conferences and when I came back to university, I started having friendly conversations with my colleagues; nothing really took off then. I guess there are two secret ingredients to make projects like this work: 1) you need a champion at the highest level of leadership; 2) you need to get the people at the right time, whether that is when a particular trend is arising, when senior leadership is reviewing their budget or when new funds have just been approved for the institution!
ZV: Do you think now is the time to continue with initiatives like Job Smart Edge?
LCM: I think this is a brilliant time. Universities had already started to do some searching around their reason for being and their positioning in the education market. COVID has accelerated all of this. The tertiary market globally is saturated and now there is a lot of good competition: why would a student consider a 3- or 4-year University degree at that price point? Why would they want to commit to such a long period of time if there are equally valid alternatives at other types of learning institutions? Universities must think carefully about where they sit in the education market and they should see these times as an opportunity and not a threat. There are indeed factors that make the university experience unique and they often sit on the peripheral of the curriculum experience. The walls between professional and academic are becoming more fluid, there is more understanding of the student journey which ultimately creates a better overall experience over the course of the students’ degrees. There has never been a better time for services like these and it is now the time to start becoming more vocal with our ideas and our plans to bring to life those ideas. Think big, it’s all possible!
Question 2: As one of the first mover in the Higher Education space to introduce work-integrated learning opportunities with employers as part of their curricula, can you share with us the biggest challenges you have encountered developing Job Smart Edge?
LCM: At Job Smart Edge, we have experienced different challenges at different growth points of the journey. In the very beginning, the main challenge was to find the right vendors: we had a very tight time schedule, and we didn’t have time to do a thorough market research. We were ringing different companies, talking about the opportunity we had, and we received mixed responses: some people ignored us, other didn’t feel like jumping on this adventure with us or didn’t agree with the timelines. Our current technology vendor partner, Practera, had been around in the Business School as a learning solution provider for a while. I wasn’t aware of their technology platform but when I pitched the idea to them, they were incredibly excited about it — our visions aligned, they had capacity to deliver and we decided to go for them. Another challenge we faced half-way through our development was fostering the right culture: many people in the team worked in the back office space and they were just not used to a more entrepreneurial work culture, where, for example, mistakes happen all the time. We had operational challenges such as budget miscalculations or plans not agreed on time. We could have had senior leadership turn their back on us, but through careful reviews, lobbying on the value of the opportunity, we got through all our operational hurdles. This is a rather unique program for the career services at university and not one you want to give up without a fight, so finding the right team to take the project forward is a constant challenge. We’ve been extremely lucky throughout our journey because we had the exact type of program management expertise we needed depending on the moment we were in; initially, we had a leader who was very comfortable in the messy space of early innovation; after we hit stability, we had a leader who was very passionate about education and helped us bring the program to life; most recently we had an operational and relationship management leader who was able to take the programs to next levels, putting all the pieces of the puzzle together in a clean manner and bringing an expanded team along on the journey.
ZV: It’s very interesting to see how you broke the challenges down in different timestamps. I also really resonate with what you mentioned about people change: most tech revolutions aren’t really about tech; they are, instead, highly people-centric! What advice would you give to another institution embarking on a similar journey?
LCM: Oh, I could talk all day… the first and most important thing is to accept that innovation is hard. Innovation is different, messy. People need to be comfortable with mistakes and failure is part of the innovation process. Secondly, one should accept that innovations require a lot of energy. Many people will laugh at you; others will tell you it’s never going to work. Be willing to take all of that on, be true to your idea and don’t hesitate to pursue it. Be an active listener for when the opportunity comes, whether that is reviewing budget, team expansion or anything conducive to big changes. Read the room, understand people’s appetite for change. Adjust your wording and approach depending on who you are speaking to and once you get going, make sure you have success metrics to take people on the journey with you! Innovation is not a something you do once; it’s a cultural change. Thirdly, find colleagues across all strategic hierarchies who share your view and can become your strategic partners. Take the approach of “I may not have the credibility or seniority to get the buy-in approval or to get something greenlighted, but I know who does has the responsibility and the power to do so”. Collaborate and grow your network to make your baby everyone’s baby. Finally, I would say that Job Smart Edge worked because as we grow, we always kept the key audience right at the centre. For us, it’s a very clear group of students, whose pain points, wants and needs are very clear to us. It’s essential to have your customer at the centre as you sift through information and possible iteration options to make the right calls. At the end of the day, it’s a compliment if a lot of people want to jump on your program and be part of its success.
Question 3: Job Smart Edge is integrated in the Business School’s curriculum as a credit bearing elective; we believe this is an important innovation. What kind of discussions did you have inside the faculty to set up Job Smart Edge?
LCM: This is a very interesting question. The whole promotion part of the project was something I never explored and that I have had to learn over the years. I was so involved in the business development that I never worried about marketing and promotion. My project manager at the time started creating some promotional material and I wasn’t sure why they were spending so much time sending reports all around the office. I didn’t realise the soft effect it was having. My colleague showed me that this is how you build your community of champions. You share your success, and you make sure they are invested in the opportunity as much as you are. The talking needed to happen so that you break down the walls with senior leadership and prepare them to interact with the decision makers. Ultimately, the Dean and Associate Deans speak to Vice Chancellors who then take part in executive committees; these are the bodies who give the greenlight for funding, so you want your program to be on their radar.
ZV: If we imagine you had to pitch the idea to the dean and a professor, how would you go about that? What kind of topics would you stress more for each persona?
LCM: In the context of my institution, the Dean is effectively the CEO of the organisation. He’s looking at the overall positioning of the program, including all pain points of the students. He’s also interested in using it as a student recruitment tool, answering questions such as how can the program get a bump in enrolments? How can it increase student satisfaction? How does it affect their graduate outcomes and alum pathways? What is the return on investment? How is it helping our reputation? The academic is instead more interested in the learning journey. Is there an opportunity to create a unit of study that is unique? Can it meet the learning outcomes and accreditation standards? Can it be at the tertiary standard? What are the research potentials off the back of this unit of study? It is a very different conversation. I’d like to add that the space academics are in is so personal to them. They invest all their blood, sweat and tears into their areas of specialisation. A new piece of work that I am thinking about is: how do we create a space that can be completely owned by the academics amongst a broader co-curricular program? It’s very important that we keep close to the academic space, this new space of a nexus between in and out of curriculum is unclaimed territory, a place where magic happened. Academics are a key stakeholder, and we need to be sensitive about their needs and wants.
ZV: This is very fascinating, Lucinda. Thank you for sharing all of this with us today! What are the next steps of JSE?
LCM: If it was me, I would just say: let’s take over the world! We’ve got a framework that works, and we could potentially expand our venture worldwide. Personally, I went from being happy writing workshops and delivering activities for students to now seeing the power of scale. Scaling up is how you ensure that you offer the transformative opportunity to as many as possible. It’s how you create a wave of change and trigger a full-blown transformation. I am determined to push the roll out of Job Smart Edge — when you have something this good, you want everyone to have it. I would like to see it tested in a new environment, whether that is another faculty or the entire university. Job Smart Edge is also at the point where it can be branded and purchased by a peer institution in the world. I’m excited to test the program elsewhere and see how it works. It really sounds like my baby has now grown and it’s ready to leave my nest and take over the world!
Key takeaways
- Having the right vision acknowledged by the senior leadership is of paramount importance for the development of entrepreneurial opportunities in the university space.
- Learn where your strengths lie and do not hesitate to reach out to vendors to further expand your program: don’t attempt to do it all by yourself!
- Now is the perfect time for universities to kickstart programs such as Job Smart Edge: it is a unique way of standing out in a crowded and noisy marketplace.
Closing statement
We thank Lucinda for taking the time to speak with us; if you want to read more about Job Smart Edge at the University of Sydney, please visit their website. Since you’re here, why not look at our other publications on Rethinking HE?
