Work Placement Visual Learning Resources

A recurring theme in the HSSO’s research, undertaken during the development of our Mandatory Work Placements Guide was the need to support students during mandatory work placement for the Certificate III in Individual Support. Employers have reported that often students on work placement are ill-prepared for their work placement periods.

Students have similarly told us that they want greater support in areas such as:

• clarity of their scope of practice (i.e. knowing what they should and should not be doing during placement)
• understanding their host organisation’s expectations of them in completing daily tasks during work placement
• accessing resources that help them with learning during work placement, including support to access and understand individualised plans and organisational policies and procedures.

This project delivered a platform that gives students, supervisors and workplace mentors quick access to resources to use during work placement.

Overview

The Work Placement Visual Resources project is piloting eight short videos designed to support students as they prepare for and undertake their work placements in residential aged care, home care or disability support.

Each 2-3 minute video covers one or more key concepts from the Certificate III in Individual Support and focus on helping students to transform their knowledge and skills into safe and effective real life work performance, and to get the most out of their work placement experience.

The project has developed videos covering concepts from four units of competency that are common to all streams of the Certificate III in Individual Support:

• CHCCCS023 – Support Independence and Wellbeing
• CHCCOM005 – Communicate and Work in Health or Community Services
• CHCDIV001 – Work with Diverse People
• CHCCCS011 – Meet Personal Support Needs.

The video series is housed on a platform that students can easily access from their mobile devices. Students can use these visual resources to better prepare for work placement and deepen their understanding of key concepts during work placement. They also provide a stimulus for conversations between students their supervisor, colleagues and clients during placement.

The learnings of this pilot project will inform development of further visual resources.

The objective is to help support and boost the confidence of students during their work placement experience. The resources are contextualised to cover the streams of the qualification (Residential Care, Home Care and Disability Support) to ensure their relevance for students chosen specialisation.

These videos are hosted on a platform which gives users quick and easy access to the resources whilst on placement or at a time convenient to them. The platform also enables offline access to resources in the instance of unreliable internet access. The platform has been optimised for access via mobile phone.

Next Steps

This project is now live, with RTOs, supervisors and employers now able to access the QIN app and the developed resources.

If you’re interested in participating in the trial, please visit the Work Placement Visual Learning Resources page on the HSSO website. Here you will find the expression of interest forms, once completed we will provide you with details on how to give your students or employees access to the platform.