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Do you think you’d like teaching, but don’t want to teach kids in a school setting? Are you also thinking about business, maybe with a bit of IT thrown in? Wilfred Sze was, and found the Bachelor of Arts in Organisational Learning was just what he was looking for.

‘I chose to do organisational learning as opposed to your primary or high school education because this has a business edge to it,’ says Wilfred Sze, who has just finished the BA in Organisational Learning. ‘You’re dealing with adults rather than kids or adolescents, so if you don’t want to get into education but you still want to be involved in training or helping people to learn, and you’re interested in business, this is the way to do it.’

UTS is a firm believer in lifelong learning, and the BA in Organisational Learning is both the literal result of that and a reflection of the strong research into workplace learning that goes on between the areas of Education and Business.

So what is organisational learning? Lecturer Dr Tony Holland puts it succinctly “Organisational learning is all about helping employees and hence their organization acquire, retain and apply new skills and knowledge to keep the organization both competitive and up to date and as well to make them a desirable place to work. It is also about helping employees to find and establish career paths within the organization and ensuring that the workplace is somewhere to be enjoyed as well as to work.  People in organisational learning try and make this happen and so are an integral part of an organization’s management team.” 

Wilfred came to the degree after working for a couple of years after he left school. ‘UTS was the only uni offering this specific course. I like the course because it’s practical. It equips you primarily to be a workplace trainer in terms of facilitating and designing courses. But you can also work as a learning analyst, determining the needs of an organisation, and there’s a bit of project management, knowledge management and all of that includes e-learning as well.’

With a PC on every office desk and the rapid rise of interactive technologies, e-learning is the teaching tool of the future – and one which is changing so fast it’s one of the most exciting areas of education. ‘Things change so quickly that anything we know now [in terms of technology] will probably be redundant in six months,’ says Wilfred. ‘It’s becoming more and more web-based, to the point where you’re using weblogs and chatrooms to teach. There’s a new thing called e-learning 2.0, which is like Web 2.0. The best example would be Web-X – web conferencing – where someone can show PowerPoint slides and the other participants can draw on it, write on it and chat live. As part of the course, we had to write our own weblogs, be involved in creating a Wiki, and we also designed our own training programs in terms of the screenshots, the modules and the activities. Even though we don’t have the technical know-how that, say, an IT student might have, we can go to an IT person and say “I want this”.’

Wilfred says the degree has introduced him to the technology, but more importantly it’s given him the principles of teaching and learning that will remain the same, whatever the means of delivery. ‘Organisational learning is pretty much focused on the training and development part,’ he says. ‘There’s the strategic focus of getting staff up-to-date with the latest knowledge their company needs, doing performance appraisals, analysing the learning needs of everyone in the organisation, developing learning programs, conducting them and evaluating their effectiveness.’

In final year the course offers two options – to go deeper into business management subjects or into educational subjects. Wilfred opted to take the educational stream, through which he did a professional work experience placement with the Learning and Development Team at RailCorp. His career path is likely to take him into working with big multinational organisations with large HR departments (where organisational learning/development is mostly based). With the experience of working in RailCorp already under his belt, Wilfred certainly knows what to expect – and is well qualified for the first graduate job of his new career.