21045 Career Development in Indigenous Community Management

Handbook description

This subject helps students review their learning, and plan career paths both for themselves and for people they manage or supervise. This is an important subject; career paths in the community sector are often unclear and overlooked as they cross over sector boundaries within the government and business sectors. The subject provides the theoretical and practical frameworks for students to integrate their credentialed and uncredentialed learning into a cohesive portfolio that positions them optimally for career choices in the sector. It enables them to identify gaps in their repertoire of knowledge and skills, gaps that can be addressed through career planning.

Subject objectives/outcomes

On successful completion of this subject, students should be able to:

1. Identify your current capabilities relevant to the course and career goals and list your professional and personal learning outcomes derived from your previous experience.
2. Prepare a resume and portfolio demonstrating your current capabilities including appropriate, validating evidence.
3. Identify possible career paths.
4. Discuss a range of career-building strategies appropriate to career goals.
5. Identify the knowledge, skills and experience required and where they can be gained, in order to achieve career goals.
6. Develop career support systems and strategies for yourself and for colleagues and/or staff in the Indigenous communities.

Contribution to graduate profile

This is a key subject in terms of ensuring that the course meets the UTS mission of providing 'higher education to enhance professional practice to serve the community at large and to enable students to reach their full personal and career potential'. It is also relevant to the overarching learning goal of the course to provide 'foundation knowledge, competencies, and values necessary for a fulfilling and effective career in Indigenous community development, management and related professions'.

In focusing students on the process of drawing together their own knowledge and experience with an aim to develop professionally, the subject also makes a major contribution to the key course objectives dealing with 'essential communication skills appropriate for progress in management' and 'work ready knowledge, technological competencies and values for Indigenous community organisational management and developmental settings'.

Teaching and learning strategies

Students will learn through a combination of set readings, lectures, workshop exercises, case studies and written assignments requiring them to apply concepts to their own work environment. Where appropriate, students will also be expected to conduct their own research in order to complete set assessment tasks.

Students will be encouraged to be active rather than passive learners. Each subject will feature 3 Block sessions through the semester, which may include a selection of the following teaching and learning strategies:

• full lectures or mini lectures (possibly including guest speakers),
• large group discussion,
• practical group exercises,
• small group discussion,
• student presentations (individual or group projects)
• workshops on specific practical skills
• role play.

Students are also required to maintain a regular reading schedule, a prescribed set of readings and/or some selected key references. In this subject there is an expectation that students will pursue their own research in areas relevant to their assessment tasks.

Central to the teaching and learning philosophy of this subject, is the integration of work based learning through assessment tasks that require students to apply theory to practice and reflect on this process in the context of their own communities and community organisations.

Content

The following topics are covered in this subject:

• Identifying current capabilities relevant to the course and also to career goals.
• Identifying professional and personal learning outcomes.
• Preparing resumes and portfolios with validating evidence.
• Mapping Indigenous and non-Indigenous career paths.
• Identifying where to gain experience.
• Career dilemmas.
• Career building strategies.
• Career networks.
• Assessing your career.
• Building power over the course of your career.
• Career anchors.
• Career mentors.

Assessment

Assessment item 1: Annotated CV

Assessment item 2: Career plan