This is the transcript for the video What industry partners are involved in the BCII and what do the projects involve?
Bem Le Hunte:
So industry partners, first of all, are so diverse. We have blue chip multinationals. We have organizations that are name brands like Ikea, like Guzman y Gomez, like Commonwealth Bank and so on, as well as having smaller innovation consultancies and startups. We have wonderful social impact organizations like the Centre for Inclusive Design, for example, like the Black Dog Institute, like Batyr.
We also have specialist organizations like Oracle engineers, for example, or organizations like consultancies, like PwC DigiTech, PwC The Difference, and so on.
Students work on a huge number of industry challenges in the time that they’re in BCII. They have a lot of choice as well around fourth year who they will work with, how they will work with those people. So students work in a big sort of think tank, if you like, in the first six years. They’re given the brief.
By the fourth year, students are creating their own briefs. They’re managing their own partners and they’re actually running their own projects in their own time. So we don’t handhold by the fourth year. By the fourth year, students are very competent industry professionals, ready to go into the workplace.
Let me describe one or two experiences. For example, one year I ran a school where we asked students to triple the digital consumption of SBS. They were working with SBS as well as their creative agency partner, Zenith Media. So they went through a whole stack of creative methods that Zenith Media taught them from creative industries and then they applied them to the SBS Challenge. The winning team got to work in SBS on an internship, and some of them also got to work with Zenith Media. So opportunities come out of this engagement, this work-integrated learning as we call it.
Another example is a recent project that students did in the fourth year on helping young people find their voice and they did this project through UNICEF. It was an incredible project and students came up with a way of young people talking to each other that UNICEF is now investing in and about to run live. So how do we capture the voice of young people, understand their political impact, even down to the post code level.
We have students who’ve come up with a whole sort of communications deck, for example, for Batyr. We’ve had students come up with learning and teaching methods. We’ve had students come up with whole new models for organizations.
As a professional, you will be engaging professionally in industry, community or government organizations, and you will have to engage with others. This is why we integrate industry, government and community at every stage of the BCII experience. Our industry partners include organizations like Batyr who improve mental health, and Black Dog Institute, right through to Centre for Inclusive Design. We have innovation consultancies. We have big blue chip multinationals like Mars Food. We have banks. We have also consultancies like PwC and Deloitte that we work with.
We have very specific industries that we work with, too, like Frasers Property like Guzman y Gomez, and we work directly for government organizations as well. So that broad range of understanding what you might do in your career becomes this open field of discovery.
You might be working, for example, on an SBS Challenge. One school I ran, we were asked to triple the consumption of SBS and this was a challenge because we were trying to engage young people in using SBS services. We were working with a digital, well, with their media agency, Zenith Media, their creative consultancy, and they gave us a whole stack of really interesting creative methods that they use in their practice. Then we took the brief from SBS and applied some of these methods to that brief of tripling consumption for SBS. So this is an example of one project.
Another project students with UNICEF, for example, in their fourth year, working closely with UNICEF to create a youth voice and political impact for young people right down to the post code level.
These are the kind of projects that students are invited to participate and to lead and these are projects that lead to incredible opportunities for our students and often jobs with the partners that they have worked with during their four years in BCII.