Work Experience
The objective of work experience is to expose you to an aspect of professional life. We would expect that most students would gain work experience in the long vacations between 2/3 rd and 3/4th year, but there is no reason why you cannot do this working part-time during the semester. Please note that the Department has the final say on whether work done fits its requirements. Further, we require from you evidence in the form of:
- a letter from the employer outlining the times of employment and the nature of the work; OR
- pay slips or a taxation statement.
However, do note our interest is in the time you spent and what you spent it on, not what you earned or the conditions of employment. For that reason, the first is a far better option. We would normally only consider the second if there is some significant reason you cannot provide the first.
We do not offer any assistance in gaining work experience as we do not have the resources to do that. Also, there is quite a diversity of possible activities that we do accept.
So, what constitutes acceptable work experience? First, three examples of where it does not:
- working in your Uncle's deli;
- working as a stacker in Coles;
- delivering pizzas.
In general terms, what you need to find falls into two categories:
- An engineering environment that can extend you professional skills. Thus working at nights for an ISP, working in a repair shop, working as a sales assistant in an electronics hobby shop are all examples of this category ( but there is still the question of what exactly you are doing ).
- An environment where there is exposure to skills of value to you in a professional career. To illustrate, cooking burgers at MacDonald's is probably not something that we accept, but if you happen to be the supervisor, then it would. Management skills are an important part of professional life.
Unfortunately it is a fact of life that students can rarely get to undertake any design work as vacation employment, but we recognise that. Hence the emphasis in the above to 'exposure'.
The major reason student's work experience has been rejected in the past has been a failure to document what they did and how long they did it. Simply getting a letter saying you were employed on a part-time basis over the last two years is not adequate. Please remember to get whoever is writing the letter to spell out times and activities, and remember too to get an email address or phone number as on occasions we may need to seek clarification.
