Industry and University Collaboration: Preparing Workplace Ready Aerospace Graduates

Today's generation of aerospace graduates faces the challenges of tomorrow's aerospace industry, universities and other educational institutions carry the responsibility to prepare them for this demanding environment. Both "the university" and "the industry" have vested, and somewhat overlapping, interests in the processes of educating students to become fully formed aerospace engineering graduates,. The university would like to produce graduates who are competitive in applying for and gaining suitable jobs, and performing at high levels in those positions. The industry would like to recruit graduates who are professional, knowledgeable and workplace-ready. It is logical that university and industry work together to design and deliver an education programme that achieves these desired outcomes, and collaboration between industry and university is essential to produce the very best graduates capable of meeting the challenges of a truly competitive environment. RMIT University has a number of initiatives that facilitate formal interaction with industry partners which typically recruit its graduates. At the curriculum development level, the Programme Advisory Committee (PAC) is the advisory body that consists of representatives from industry, government and academia. The PAC advises on issues such as relevance of material covered, personnel development issues, knowledge versus cognitive skills, etc. In course delivery, RMIT University makes extensive use of guest lecturers from industry in order to cover specialist topics and to provide practical expert knowledge in design, contemporary issues, and in capstone thesis projects. The involvement of industry experts in the course delivery has now been formalised university wide in the Work Integrated Learning (WIL) initiative. This initiative regulates the requirement for all programmes to have a minimum industry involvement in the delivery of those programmes.