Ahead of the rest: preparing students for the workplace

With competition for nursing graduate positions especially tough at the moment, here at Health Skills Australia (HSA) we are working on an exciting project to ensure our students are ahead of the rest.

Using ePortfolios, we are enabling our students to not only have a professional showcase of who they are as nurses, but also to be able to demonstrate their competence to nursing standards, store their continuous professional development and have an area for reflection; all essential requirements to work as a nurse today.

As far as we’re aware, Health Skills Australia will be unique in providing this opportunity for our students!

The plan is for the ePortfolio to be rolled out with the new curriculum in 2016. All staff are involved in linking the units in the new curriculum to the ePortfolio. This will enable students to build and add to it throughout their course. When they finish their Diploma of Nursing they will have their ePortfolio ready for job applications and lifelong professional learning.

We are planning to run a 10-week ePortfolio trial from the end of February where a selection of both staff and students will create their own ePortfolios using two different platforms and give feedback on each one.

One of the trial platforms we are using is on wix.com. You can check out our mock student profile here.

We are excited about our ePortfolio and what it will mean for our students. I’ll update you with more once the trial has completed. In the meantime, if you have any questions or want to know more about ePortfolios, please contact: Ingrid.Devlin@navitas.com or connect on Yammer