UTS students named “most employable” in future leaders awards

The success of UTS students in this year’s Top 100 Future Leaders awards has propelled their university to a joint win in another category, the Most Employable Students Award, in the annual ranking of both graduate employers and student talent by GradConnection and The Australian Financial Review.

This year 2000 students applied for the Top 100 Future Leaders awards run by GradConnection, which links university graduates with future employers. These were pared down to 100 based on their applications, with UTS having 14 in the top 100, equal with Monash University, which shared the Most Employable Students Award. All the students who made it to the finals participated in gamified simulated assessments that required them to demonstrate high level teamwork, communication and negotiation skills.

UTS had finalists in seven of the ten student awards categories and last night two were announced as winners, with Bachelor of Accounting student James Hewat presented the KPMG Accounting Award and Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) student Dakota Harkins winning the REA Group Software Engineering Award.

UTS Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education and Students), Professor Shirley Alexander, said the institutional award was recognition of the outcomes of UTS’s longstanding commitment to providing a practice-oriented educational experience for its students.

“It links theory to practice by ensuring that every student has an opportunity for an internship or internship-like experience, and using a curriculum that includes opportunities to develop the attributes that employers tell us are critical to the future of work – good communication skills, ability to work in teams, critical thinking and problem-solving,” Professor Alexander said.

“UTS can only achieve these outcomes by maintaining a close connection with industry and we are very grateful to them for their close involvement in all aspects of curriculum design, delivery and assessment.”

A UTS finalist for the Quantium Data Science Award, Amy Robertson, told The Australian Financial Review she studied mainly humanities at high school, believing she’d eventually go into education.

But once she was studying at UTS the world of numbers and computing came into focus.

“When I sat down in the right environment with people who were talking me through how it worked, it really clicked,” Amy told journalist Ruth Callaghan. “I love the problem solving and the hacking at something until it works.”

She told Callaghan she now speaks at schools as part of a women in engineering and IT outreach group, letting students know that their high school choices don’t have to define their careers.

On the employer side UTS Careers sponsored two awards as part the Top 100 Graduate Employers 2019. Most Popular Technology Employer (Small) was won by Quantium and Most Popular Technology Employer (Large) was IBM.