DBS has recently celebrated the first graduations from our new course in Recruitment and Talent Acquisition, co-designed with the Recruitment, Consulting & Staffing Association (RCSA) after they saw a need for specialist candidates in recruitment roles.
Graduating in February, the group is already showing just how beneficial a post-grad course in recruitment can be.
Payton Buffington says she stumbled into recruitment after studying a Bachelor of Business and Creative Industries. She enjoyed her work but felt she didn’t have a solid theoretical base to draw from.
Since enrolling in Deakin’s Graduate Certificate of Recruitment and Talent Acquisition, Payton has been promoted twice by her project resourcing specialist employer Concentis. She says that wouldn’t have happened without further focused studies.
“When I first embarked on the course, I got my first promotion,” she says. “And that led me into leading a team, as well as having more responsibilities and getting to put a little bit more of my initiatives into the business.
“And then, at the completion of my degree, and having been able to apply what I had been learning, I was promoted again to the role of Operational Excellence Lead.”
Senior Lecturer Dr Justine Ferrer was instrumental in the development of the course, and she says she can see the benefits taking shape for the first graduates.
“The Graduate Certificate in Recruitment and Talent Acquisition has provided the students with a qualification and some theory behind what they do every day,” she says. “So it reinforces their everyday practice, but also introduces them to new practices and new ways of doing, and new theoretical approaches that give them an edge and a benefit in the industry.”
Dr Ferrer says feedback from students has been positive.
“Students have told me what makes the course stand out is that all of it is relevant to what they do,” she says. “So, none of it is redundant, none of it is irrelevant. All of the modules were carefully selected and curated with the RCSA to actually reflect what is going on in the industry, and because they’ve got this new knowledge behind them they can now approach professional challenges differently.”
Payton says what she appreciated about the course was its direct application into the work she was doing in her job.
“The theory and the concepts I was learning in this course – I was directly applying them into work life, whether that be in the people analytics space, or in recruitment and selection tactics. It was all directly relevant and I could apply it in real-life situations.”
Payton also sings the praises of Deakin staff, who she says were accommodating and helpful throughout her studies.
“I am in Brisbane and the course is in Melbourne, so it was good that it was a mix of online and in person, but I was lucky enough to be able to do all of it online – whether that was watching a recording or actually attending a lecture or workshop and getting to speak to a lecturer and other students,” she says.
“And the classes were all at night, so I could log in after work or I could go home, have dinner, and then log into a class, which was ideal for fitting my studies around full-time work.
“The way that the teachers and lecturers approached the learning was especially helpful for postgraduate students. They understand we all have working lives, and so they don’t just want you to tick and flick everything off, or get an assignment done for the sake of it. They actually want you to learn, so if that meant granting an extension or replying to emails and answering a little bit more, and giving you that support, they really followed through with it. That was immensely helpful.”
Dr Ferrer sees the successes of this first group of graduates as just the beginning, with a clear demand for specialist qualifications in recruitment.
“I think organisations are seeing the benefit of outsourcing their recruitment right now,” says Dr Ferrer. “So this is where we’re seeing a massive growth in the recruitment industry: in recruitment agencies, labour hire agencies, job placement, and executive headhunters.
“It’s easy for a company to outsource if they want a new COO, for example, to a headhunter that can come back with the best candidates, rather than going through their own processes of trying to advertise and then shortlist and things like that. So I think that’s probably one of the biggest drivers in the growth in the recruitment industry.
“I also think that with career mobility and people moving jobs quite a lot, that this is also driving an uplift in and growth in the recruitment industry because people are looking for new opportunities, and other options.”
If you’d like to further your career in specialist recruitment, Payton says the Graduate Certificate of Recruitment and Talent Acquisition is worth serious consideration.
“I would say absolutely do it,” she says. “Definitely, as long as you’ve got a supportive workplace in order to do so. What you learn from it, you get back tenfold.”
Learn more about Deakin’s Graduate Certificate of Recruitment and Talent Acquisition.