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 aims to deliver 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 will develop and pilot 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 will cover 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 will initially develop and pilot 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 will be housed on a platform that students can easily access from their mobile devices. The intention is for students to be able to use these visual resources to better prepare for work placement and deepen their understanding of key concepts during work placement. They will also provide a stimulus for conversations between students their supervisor, colleagues and clients during placement.

Following development of the initial set of videos during August to October 2022, the visual resources will be piloted with work placement students.  The learnings of this pilot project will inform development of further visual resources in 2023.

The objective is to help support and boost the confidence of students during their work placement experience. The resources will be 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 will be 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.

The HSSO will be working with stakeholders to identify employers, RTOs and student cohorts to trial the platform in late 2022.