The Christmas break is also when many of us catch up with friends and family from further away.
This year, I have been struck by what, I feel, is an increase in the number of school-leavers from other regional locations choosing to study close to home.
It’s an eye-opener to hear friends in Gippsland talk about their kids studying biomedicine, engineering, business, physio and OT on campus while continuing to live at home.
And then to hear about their summer placements with local corporations and businesses, and some very generous incentives and scholarships offered to attract them to study locally and then stay local.
In contrast, local conversations have been about the cost of living away from home, whether our kids need to offer above the advertised rent to secure a property, and the humorous stories of friends and cousins repeatedly bumping into each other as they view house after house and anxiously wait to hear if they have secured a property.
So, I asked VTAC for a listing of all the undergraduate courses offered on campus across regional Victoria and southern NSW — and it is a stark comparison.
We have three areas of study – social work, education and nursing. Cold, wet and windy Warrnambool (population 32,000) has more than double our local onsite offering.
Over recent years, our local universities have helped to expand our offerings, with bio-med graduates now able to study medicine in Shepparton.
NorVicFoods is bringing master’s students to Shepparton to work with industry, and La Trobe is working closely with our local TAFEs to enable articulation into degrees. And, of course, there is a vast array of courses now available online.
It’s also worth looking at the role industry plays in shaping local education pathways.
In Ballarat, the local university tech park is a collaboration between the university and IBM that emerged from the relocation of large-scale call centres to Ballarat, and the need to grow the local IT and communications workforce to maintain the systems.
In 1995, the park became IBM’s headquarters for computing services throughout south-east Asia.
Gippsland’s Churchill campus is an earlier version of industry-led collaboration.
It’s built on its history of power generation and offshore oil.
The campus began as the Yallourn Technical School in 1928 to train SEC workers for the Yallourn Power Station and evolved to become a university in the 1990s.
More recently, a quick Google search shows that TransGrid partnered with Bathurst (population 44,000) campus to offer 100 $20,000 scholarships over the next four years for students to study engineering.
The program involves two years on campus and two years of paid cadetships in industry.
During 2025, our region will be the focus of several major transformations as we address water, energy, health services and Australia’s sovereign manufacturing and food security.
Within these discussions, we must ensure we keep local training and education pathways on the agenda.
We have a dispersed and diverse industry and economy, but when it comes to the skilled workforce, there are common skills and qualifications that we need and will continue to need.
Taking a leaf out of other regional communities, there is a clear role for industry — large and small — to help define what we need and how it will integrate with and into local industry.
Linda Nieuwenhuizen is the chief executive of the Committee for Greater Shepparton.
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