Roundtable Presentation 6th World Congress on Positive Psychology 2019

Co-Creating A University-Wide Approach To Developing Students’ Future Focused Employability Skills: Appreciative Inquiry As A Methodology To Transform Culture And Accepted Paradigms (#323)

Berni Cooper 1 , Louise Hooper 1
  1. Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

Developing employable students has become a point of differentiation for universities. Many argue that the skills and mindsets required for students to thrive in the current rapidly changing world of work transcend the traditional skills required for the more secure jobs of the past. To support students to develop future-focused employability skills, an Australian university undertook a project to develop online resources. We identified that in order to develop relevant, and innovative resources that would actually be used we needed an approach that would enable transformative culture change in the university and would include stakeholders (staff, students, industry, community) in the development process. Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is a culture change methodology focusing on positive transformation, the desired future, and co-creating with all stakeholders. This presentation will discuss the pros and cons of using AI in this project. Outcomes were favourable and included three deliverables: A Career Development Learning Framework; a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC); and a suite of flexible online learning experiences. Additionally, our stakeholders are embracing the resources (they have been embedded in each of the six faculties) and are thinking differently about what employability skills are and how to develop them.