A model for effective industry-education partnerships through authentic industry placements

Authentic industrial placements offer great benefits for engineering students and industry hosts alike. Industry placements offer students the opportunity to develop professional and technical skills by working alongside professional engineers in an industrial environment. This experience can serve to provide context, meaning and motivation for their engineering studies. At the same time, industry placements offer industrial hosts a great opportunity to support research projects and to engage with the next generation of engineers. The Engineering and Architecture and Information Technology (EAIT) Faculty at the University of Queensland (UQ) supports engineering students to undertake industrial placements during their engineering studies. The faculty has long-standing partnerships with many industrial companies in Queensland who host placements for engineering students across undergraduate and postgraduate levels. The EAIT Faculty has a particularly strong association with Queensland Urban Utilities (QUU), the main provider of water and wastewater services to over 1.4 million customers in South-East Queensland. Since 2014, UQ EAIT Faculty and QUU have established a strong industry placements program as part of the integrated UQ Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) and Master of Engineering (BE/ME) program. Twenty BE/ME students, including sixteen chemical engineering students, have been placed at QUU's wastewater treatment plants across QUU's service territory for periods of 24 weeks. The benefits to both parties are great. UQ engineering students have gained invaluable experience being mentored by experienced QUU engineers. At the same time, QUU has achieved some significant and valuable project outcomes from the work conducted by the students and has strengthened its talent pipeline for new graduate engineers. This paper explores the development, challenges and benefits of the QUU-UQ BE/ME industry placement program.