"What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up?" This is a question asked time and time again to young people as they go through their school studies. Whilst a common question for young people, the challenge is that often a lot of them don't know what they want to be.
Towards the end of 2021 we teamed up with Logan City Council to explore how we could help young people in the Logan community answer this question by introducing them to a range of career pathways that aren't always mentioned in the typical careers booklet.
For this, we delivered three full-day Industry Innovator hackathons for students in the Logan community. Teaming up with our amazing partners at yourtown, the National Retail Association, and Akunah, we developed three unique programs designed to get students exploring the different career pathways available to them in these industries.
Our yourtown program was a full day hackathon centered around mental health with students looking at how they could develop an initiative or service that would help schools, government, and organisations such as yourtown provide better, more accessible services to help young people with their mental health. Over the course of the day students heard from yourtown team members, explored initiatives being led around the world, and then took time to consider their target users in their community before then pitching their final solution back to the yourtown team.
After exploring all things mental health, we then dived into the exciting world of retail as we delivered a 'Future Of Retail' hackathon with the National Retail Association. This action-packed day saw students redesigning the retail experience for one of their favourite stores. Over the course of the day students explored how stores around the world are innovating in order to offer truly unique experiences to their customers, before then applying their learnings to their favourite brand and pitching those ideas to the National Retail Association team.
Finally, we then changed gears to get students looking at Medical Innovations with local med-tech startup Akunah. In this program, students were challenged to develop a pitch that would be presented in front of a hypothetical board of hospital directors to convince them how they can improve patient outcomes in surgery by incorporating technology. Over the course of the day students spent time exploring the technologies Akunah currently works with, innovative trends in the industry, and the challenges faced in the industry today, before then applying this knowledge to the final challenge.
In order to track the impact of these programs, we also asked students to fill our a brief survey at the beginning and end of each program to measure how confident they felt using different skills and explaining different concepts. This data was then collated and compared at the end of each program and clearly showed the increase in confidence and skills in relation to the industry challenge presented.
We had such a brilliant time working with the Logan City Council and our amazing industry partners to make this program happen, and we can't wait to see where the students in these programs go in their careers.
If you're an industry partner looking to work with some amazing young people, make sure to check out our For Corporates page. And if you're an educator wanting to organise some industry-aligned programming for your students, make sure to contact us.