How does Future Amp help young people build industry-relevant skills before they get a job?
By the age of 25, only half of young Australians have been able to secure more than 35 hours of work per week which classifies them to be full-time employed (ABS definition), and 75% of young Australians don’t believe they have the relevant vocational and practical work experience the market asks for.
But how can you get experience without a job, and a job without experience?
This is a question we have asked 100’s of students, industry leaders, policy makers, researchers, educators and parents over the past 18 months, in order to better understand how young people (stuck at home or inside classrooms) in a pandemic world can be supported to access skills-based work experience, make more informed decisions about real-world career pathways in today’s companies, and build the skills they need for social and economic participation and success.
But getting work experience at all is tricky at a time like this.
While the current world environment continues to see high youth unemployment and ongoing disruptions to the workforce, education and training, there is also therefore a critical response needed to shift career education to more flexible, on-demand, data-driven solutions and differentiated opportunities for students to go ‘inside’ real companies and real jobs to meet real people.
If young people can’t get out into the real world of work to gain experience, how can we bring it to them instead?
At Future Amp, we believe the answer is by bringing the world of work to students virtually - anywhere, anytime - with the help of 100’s of virtual industry mentors, the backing of global and local companies, 1000’s of data points with up-to-date workforce information, all accessible in a market-leading, proprietary, all-in-one platform to support millions of students and institutions with industry-relevant workforce skills courses, pre-employment career exploration and predictive analytics dashboards to collect data, gather insights and provide individual feedback.
One of the most popular areas of the Future Amp platform is our Learning Areas.
Think of it like Linkedin Learning - a place where students can build skills, meet virtual industry mentors, and complete 200+ hours of Australian Curriculum mapped, short, industry-backed courses designed especially for students, which have been road-tested by educators and students across Australia.
Virtual Work Experience is one of those extensive learning areas, which has been co-designed and built with students, to make sure the content experience is relevant, relatable and can be applied to real-world workforce settings.
Virtual Work Experience (VWX) brings an organisation to life in a short course, where students are put in the driver’s seat and can learn key workforce concepts, build employability skills and experience ‘a day in the life’ of a company.
These industry-aligned 60-minute courses simulates a 5-day week, where students learn about what an organisation does, roles and pathways available and teamwork practices, before completing a workplace task based on one of the 12 employability skills that feature throughout the platform.
For students, VWX offers a VIP backstage pass into a whole host of companies, big and small, and helps them to access authentic, relevant, meaningful and purposeful workforce learning opportunities, anytime, anywhere.
For organisations we work with, it is a unique opportunity to engage with their consumer, build their future talent pipeline and showcase people, pathways, skills and opportunities to the next generation, to get them excited about a potential career in that company or industry.
Developing VWX to meet the needs of students, educators and industry has been a balancing act, making sure we’re delivering value to each of our three key stakeholders.
Firstly, we have our user, the student, to engage and keep central to the VWX UX and learning pathway. It’s our job to build online courses that are skills-based, active and engaging yet accessible, and to ignite the interests and passions of young people so they can design their own learning pathways, and use a mix of resources that make the most sense to them. Students best uncover and discover what’s possible for them by going ‘inside’ companies to learn from real people about real jobs and real skills.
Secondly, we have our customer, the teacher, to consider, ensuring that VWX content can link to cross-curricular learning outcomes, fit within class timetables and have assistive teaching sequences and lesson plans available when used in blended or hybrid learning environments.
And thirdly, we have our partner, the company, to work with, so we can co-design a rich, up-to-date, authentic learning experience that showcases their people, pathways, company values and skill competencies. This has to be balanced with creating a course that is engaging, educational and provides learning acceleration for students, and is not just a sponsored, graduate marketing advertorial or logo splash with poor engagement and learning outcomes for students, and ultimately, a poor value exchange for the company or brand.
That’s why we have tested Future Amp VWX courses with 100’s of students and leading industries across Australia, and are now at V3, having iterated the design based on regular user feedback, while also benchmarking against what other players in this space are creating.
Here’s what a Future Amp VWX course looks like for students.
Days 1 & 2 are an introduction to the company.
By the end of this section of the course, we want the student to be able to elevator pitch what the organisation is all about.
Following an engaging and personalised, narrative structure, a guide from the organisation welcomes the student to the company through a blend of video, text and interactive learning exercises. Think of it as a summary or overview of what you’d usually find on a home page, but with more conversation and interactivity for the student.
We also use this as an opportunity to introduce the student to a range of workforce concepts relevant to the industry. For example, we may explore company values and how they play a role in culture; the difference between outcomes and outputs in the not-for-profit sector; or the meaning of ethical production in the beauty industry. It’s a chance to broaden the scope of the course and company, and lay the seeds of important industry or labour market ideas and practices the student may not have been familiar with prior.
Days 3 & 4 are all about people.
Students learn about what roles and employment pathways are available at the company, how they might develop skills to perhaps work there one day, and the organisation’s approach to teamwork.
A highlight in this section are our Colleague Conversations, where students watch three engaging interviews with company team members about their day-to-day roles. This is complemented by a great FAQ section that breaks down the hiring process and the organisation’s expectations of a potential employee, from internships, to graduate positions through to permanent roles.
One of the newer additions to our VWX courses are our Ways of Working section, the brainchild of our VWX intern and Future Amp Youth Advisory Board Member, Kai Lovel.
In the Ways of Working section, we dive into what teamwork looks like inside companies, and explore productivity tools (such as Slack, Trello, Asana, Confluence etc.) that a team uses to stay connected. We know that digital literacy in remote and distributed ways of working are becoming increasingly important, so we want students to develop awareness and literacy of key communication tools companies use, and how they can be applied in team settings.
Day 5 is the final section.
In this part of the course, students have to apply their knowledge and understanding and complete a VWX task that gives them an idea of the kind of work that gets done at the organisation.
This task is linked to one of the 12 key employability skills we explore elsewhere on the platform, such as critical thinking, teamwork or creativity. We ground the task in context that has been laid throughout the course as student’s will have to apply their learning to, for example, make values-based decisions or help the company choose a manufacturing partner. These are short, interactive activities, and include templates, instructions and a best practice example for students to compare their attempt against upon completion.
Future Amp VWX gives students an inside look at the world of work, teaching them not only about specific organisations, but giving them real-world understandings or skills, industries, jobs and the current hiring market.
Like all learning inside the platform, the VWX course experience is translatable, adding pieces to the puzzle for the student as they build skills, explore, understand and contemplate the kind of work they might do one day. It is not just about them considering the company in front of them, but demystifying what working life is actually like, so they can refine interests, build an employability profile, connect themselves to the real world of work, and make a more informed decision about where they want to take themselves in the future.