Transcript Title: Recession Proof Careers Author(s): Swinburne Marketing Services Year: 2020 John Hopkins Hi everybody, my name is John Hopkins and I'm an Innovation Fellow for Swinburne University. I'll be your host today for Recession-Proof Careers, which is part of Swinburne web sessions series. Before we start, I'll make an acknowledgement of country in the spirit of reconciliation. Swinburne University of Technology acknowledges the traditional custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders, past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today. Today’s topic is recession-proof careers. So what is a recession-proof career? We're going to be talking about that to identify what a recession-proof career is. Just as an example, my background is in supply chain management and obviously 2020 has been a particularly unusual year for all of us having the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout that whole period, it's really underlined how important supply chains are. First of all we had the toilet paper shortage, we had panic buying, stockpiling as well as shortages of tinned food, rice and staple foods like that throughout the whole COVID-19 period. It's really underlined how important jobs are in supply chain in ensuring that consumers like us can go to supermarkets or go to pharmacies and those products are still available. In a similar way, how are other careers resilient to external pressures like a pandemic or through some sort of economic pressure such as a recession? We're going to be looking at what kind of jobs and skill sets are in demand. Obviously after a period like COVID-19, it’s such a huge disruption there quite often are new opportunities so we're going to be exploring some of those. We're going to be looking at how you may be able to retrain or up skill and take advantage of these opportunities that may emerge. We also will be looking towards what the future of work might look like. To help me with this I have a panel of academic experts so first of all we have Bruce Thompson and he's the Dean of the School of Health Sciences and he's also the President of the Thoracic Society of Australia and New Zealand. We also have Therese Keane, she's the Deputy Chair in the Department of Education at Swinburne and we have Damien Scott, he's the coordinator of our Diploma of Digital and Interactive Games. As well as our panel, we also will be answering your questions. We received some audience questions in advance of today's events and we will be tackling those. There's also a live chat function so you can take part in this event live and our team is there standing by to answer any course related questions, queries or any technical issues that you might have so feel free to use that function. Okay we'll start with our panel. First of all in terms of recession-proof careers, what are they, and why and what particular areas may be more recession-proof than others, we'll start with Bruce. Bruce tell us a little bit about yourself, your area and how your area is recession-proof. Bruce Thompson Hi I'm Bruce Thompson, I'm the Dean of the School of Health Science and my background career is actually as a hospital scientist. I worked for 27 years in the areas of respiratory medicine primarily, but also in cardiology as well as suite laboratories. Health is very recession-proof as at the end of the day we always will need nurses, we always will need doctors, and we will always need physiotherapists because these are the people that basically keep us well. It's also the same with science and medical science, at the end of the day if we think about COVID at the moment, we need a vaccine and we need it now. We need nurses here and now. If we looked at somewhere like New York and the UK, what have you there is a major shortage of healthcare workers especially in a pandemic such as this. The good thing about health across the whole board is it is highly recession-proof. Even if it's a financial recession going on, everyone still needs to see their doctor,

nurse, physiotherapist, community nurse or whomever so it’s a highly exciting area to be in and again highly recession-proof. John Hopkins I think throughout the COVID-19 period we've obviously had appreciation for health stuff before for our doctors and nurses and that appreciation has probably never been higher than it is today. Bruce Thompson Oh absolutely, we're lucky in Australia we really did dodge a bullet because we closed the whole thing down and we have amazing health care in Australia. But we could have seen what's happened overseas especially in New York, the UK, Italy, and Spain where this thing took a little while to get going and then how the whole system just got overrun. It's a respiratory condition it leaves you horrible deficits after it's happened. This is one area that we need to have significant investment in and we will always need doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, and occupational therapists, all the things that we train John Hopkins Well thanks Bruce. So moving to Therese, Therese tell us a little bit about yourself in your area and why your area may be recession-proof. Therese Keane Thanks John, I've been a teacher for 17 years in secondary schools and my teaching background is IT. I've been a director of IT for many of those years so I've overseen computers within schools. I've also seen one-to-one laptops, I've seen staff training, professional development, and I've overseen the help desk within schools. So I've been involved in curriculum development and also the hardware software strategic side of things plus obviously teaching so that's really in essence my background. I've been in tertiary for the last 10 years as well. I have to say that with COVID-19, education and teachers have been considered to be an essential worker. So teachers are essential workers, childcare operators and childcare teachers they're essential workers, as are primary school teachers. COVID-19 really brought out the best in our teachers where they had to quickly pack themselves up and move online. Now, whilst teachers have got this training and they've learnt how to use computers over the last decade to a decade and a half, it's really not been as practiced as what we had to do only just recently. So teachers are very important and also in terms of recession-proof we always will need teachers so it is a very important career John Hopkins Thanks Therese, it's obviously been a really big year for teaching around the globe. If they're any high school students watching this webinar or any teachers or even any parents, I'm sure this period would have impacted your lives in some way, shape or form. You think moving forward Therese, obviously there's been a lot of teaching from home and new digital technologies. Do you think there's going to be more of a shift towards using digital technologies in teaching? Therese Keane Absolutely I mean we've been using digital technologies for at least 10 years but I think now that teachers have actually had to use it in a compulsory way I suspect that there's going to be more reliance on it and even looking at blended ways of teaching. John Hopkins Very interesting. Okay next we'll move to Damian, so Damien tell us a little bit about yourself and your area and why your area is seen as being recession proof

Damian Scott I'm the coordinator of the Diploma of Digital Games at PAVE (Pathway and Vocational Education). My job is very simple, I get people ready for the workplace. I've been teaching and designing games programs for 20 years now across a variety of institute's. I’m also the CEO and Design Lead for a small company called Primal Clarity Productions and essentially we're a small company that focuses on projects that attempts to bridge the dramaturgical gap between film and games. So our industry right now, this global games industry, is actually in rude good health so much so that I almost feel like I need to apologize to some of the other creative industries that have been basically devastated and had their livelihoods kind of axed overnight. The good news though is that our industry is actually comprised of very diverse skill sets requiring many different types of professionals coming in so combining that with the idea now that the games industry is starting to look outside of its paddock a little bit and connecting with other industries in a way they haven't before is really good. So hopefully we'll kind of catch some of those displaced creatives. To say that the games industry has been going well is glossing over the fact that it's been doing very well for twenty years now. It barely noticed the global financial crisis, however Australia was hit hard with that because we were predominantly bankrolled by US money. Since 1999, the games industry has earned more than Hollywood year in year out and 2020 is expected to top one hundred and fifty nine billion, up 9% year by year from last. The forecasts are looking at about 200 billion for 2023 so wonderful growth. There's a few reasons why though which I think they're definitely related to the fact that it's a recession-proof career. Firstly the demographics, the average age of a gamer now is 33 years old. People are very surprised by that, we've grown up and we're still playing games. Even more interestingly, 45% of those gamers are now female and this is a really profound shift even from five years ago so that's really good. Also we're seeing perhaps with more influence with women coming into the industry, a shift towards games that are trying to avoid the stress induced cortisol dopamine rollercoaster action which is representative of like 90 percent of action games that are coming out. We're moving more towards gentle, inclusive and shared experiences and you don't have to go any further than the delightful Animal Crossing game to know what I'm talking about there. Thirdly, gamers always enjoyed the challenges and delights but we’ve also used games to self-medicate and in so doing, we've probably even addressed basic psychological needs such as feeling in control, having choices and being connected. There's always been a deep sense of connection with gamers and I think isolation is only really enforced that idea. My last kind of point is the pandemic has really highlighted what games are really great at and I think there's a real opportunity to rewrite the mainstream media narrative around games, where headlines of ugly things like copycat killings, violence and addiction are common place. We can turn that into something much more meaningful and to a much wider audience as well. So just picking up on Therese’s point, that jolt of now all going to online and Therese, I very much appreciate your comments. I am predominantly still a teacher and it was pretty interesting few months. This online world kind of really challenges us to change our identities and asks us to find new ways to express ourselves. I'm very confident that there's a new generation of designers who understand that playing games is another way of looking after ourselves and they will create products that kind of hopefully further erode Hollywood’s bottom line. John Hopkins It's very interesting that you mentioned the mental health aspect of it. Obviously during COVID-19 a lot of people have had their lives changed, not being able to do the things that they normally do, go to the places they normally go, maybe so many were self-isolating on their own. Bruce, do you see this as having an impact going forward in the health space? Bruce Thompson Absolutely, mental health is becoming a major problem at the moment. The incidence of suicide is sadly really increased, the incidence of just depression and anxiety has also increased during this time. This has been something that's been addressed within the university itself. We actually have a couple of major studies going on in terms of an app that's also been released looking after people's mental health. Clearly, locking up people in terms of home isolation, it's just really tough, homes not a great place for many people as well. It just raises issues that have been existing for many years, now they basically have to sit there and live it all the time. So this is a significant problem and it's one of the major concerns mentioned on the media, especially with

children at home, that there was really a bit of a push to try and get them back into school. Because at the end of the day, this is not helping the overall mental health of the whole family environment but also it's making it very difficult for people to work if their expected to home school as well. So there's a number of facets, A) people are scared because of this of this virus. Ultimately there’s no need to be because we're all isolating and this virus is behaving as we expected to. Understandably there are concerns out there, but also people, as I said, having to work in an environment that they're not used to. We just heard before converting everything to online in the medical profession, we're now doing a lot of telehealth, which is a new way of actually practicing healthcare and then on top of that that just leads to stress and anxiety. So that's been one of the significant increases in effort that’s been done in basically the whole of the mental health aspect of health. John Hopkins You mention the technology side of things and many different careers and occupations have been impacted by technologies haven't they. Having online appointments was probably pretty rare and seeing your GP online, but do you think that's the kind of thing that will continue going forward? Bruce Thompson Oh absolutely and it's interesting if you think of the Royal Flying Doctor service from in the 50’s and 60’s, where someone had to sit there and pedal a generator to be able to get enough electricity to actually start setting up your HF radio to talk to a doctor that is maybe is three or four hundred kilometres away. You know this has been around for a while but now we have this, the whole video environment that we can actually sort of talk to someone one-on-one. There's lots of different modes from the whole video to just picking up the telephone and this will probably become actually a significant player in moving forward. It sort of has to be and on top of that it's more than this sort of form of telehealth, it's also actually starting to use our wearables. Actually start thinking about what sort of information can we collect. I'm involved in a COVID care app where we actually thought Royal Melbourne hospital is going to have 2,000 patients admitted in one month in the month of July, they can't cope with that. There are 350 bed hospitals, it's just not going to work. So the concept was going to be, right you've got a virus, here’s the app, take your temperature, your blood, your respiratory rate, heart rate, if you've got a watch you can get that heart rate straightaway and potentially even measure oxygen saturation. So this is technology that we're developing to basically allow people to be able to do the standard observations that you have in hospitals, beam it straight to the actual hospital themselves so they can monitor it. If you start escalating bang you have an appointment sitting there, if you end up getting better you get a nice little happy face after a couple of weeks to say you know you done really well. John Hopkins That’s fascinating and as careers change like that and technology become a bigger part of it, obviously the skill sets are going to change. Thanks for that. So we've established that health, education and gaming are all pretty robust areas and careers as far as being recession-proof. So I'll come back to you Therese so what I want to do now is really kind of drill down a little bit further and looking at education what kind of specific opportunities are there out there. Let's say somebody's a young person looking at going to university, not quite sure what they want to do, where do you see there being these gaps and shortages? Therese Keane Well there's gaps in lots of different places and there's also gaps depending on I hate to say but your sex/gender actually also makes a difference. Let's take primary school teachers for example most of the primary school teachers are female and they're always crying out for male teachers so that's one area. Obviously regional schools also require teachers, they don't mind which gender they get but it's always very hard to staff schools that are in the country. Then there's the secondary side of things, there's always the math, science and the technologies areas so there are certain areas that are particularly harder to staff than others. Obviously in child care there's always a lot of needs particularly with very good early learning child care teachers so there's gaps throughout the whole profession. Given that there's also a high attrition rate in terms of people are leaving because they're retiring, there's always need to have new teachers coming in and the

shortage just keeps on continuing because people will retire and they'll leave the profession. So there's always a need to have more teachers or new graduates coming in to take these spots. John Hopkins Yes I mean that's fascinating and there’s obviously clear potential there and as you mentioned before, we're always going to have teachers. I'm going to move on to Damian but before I do that I'll ask you guys out there watching online for our first audience poll. We'd really like to hear your feedback and the first polling questions should be appearing around that. Okay, Damian so in terms of gaming drilling down into more detail. What kind of specific areas, presumably technologies, are changing all the time, as well as what skills around the development of games are changing too? Tell us also a little bit more about where you might see some shortages and opportunities? Damian Scott Well the games industry, the people who come to it traditionally have a very high level of IT literacy so that's one thing that's been consistent. In terms of shortages, that's a little bit more interesting to answer because we're essentially an entertainment industry so we're ostensibly driven by making money. There's various systems that can happen with existing publishers and all that stuff. Obviously we've got things like virtual reality and augmented reality, which there's still lots of discovery to come with those technologies. Our students currently are playing around with those and having a great time. We're also seeing new business opportunities emerging through the use of game engine technologies, which is allowing developers to greatly speed up their production, giving them the opportunity to focus less on technical problems and more on creative solutions. So industries have traditionally used 3D visualization and simulation to solve problems that they have. What we're seeing now is that the developers can use games technology to not just show the problems but actually provide a point where they can interact with those problems. That really changed the way that they can approach those things so it's just a really good example. There’s this new thing called virtual production which is doing the rounds in film and TV across the world. We would normally have a green screen but now there's a live LCD screen and its synchronized perfectly with the cameras on set to a game engine that's running live at 60 frames per second in the background. It's really changing workflows and it's allowing many traditional roles and post-production to happen now during production. So we're getting visual effects artists even editors live on set being able to directly manipulate what's happening in front of those screens so it's disruptive but in the best possible use of that word. John Hopkins Well that's fascinating and I know a lot of young people who might be watching today one question that they always have is where's the money so where are the other high paying jobs in your industry? Damian Scott I feel I should start this answer with a bit of a caveat. I've mentioned that it's a hit driven business and I'm one to sort of describe it as one that suffers under the yolk of the profits of zeitgeist. You've always got people leading what they think will be next but I'm firmly on the side of the indie developer that packs a 12-gauge with intellectual property and walks into the room and suddenly all the big guys wonder where their monthly subscribers have gone. There's also a general attitude in the games industry in my experience that it's enough to work on your dream, so salaries have sometimes come under that. I think it's the same profits of zeitgeist that are pushing that narrative as well so in Australia the average salaries are around $73,000 and you can get an additional $4,000 in bonuses and profiteering, which is fantastic. Senior roles could get up to about a hundred and five plus but given as I said the hit driven nature of the business, profit sharing royalties and bonuses are now even placed upon good reviews of your products and are actually bolstering salaries quite a lot. But the real money is in controlling your intellectual property. If you can do that, then you can do well and freelancers are actually doing quite well. The problem that’s been kind of endemic in the industry is that the idea that you're a games company, not like a studio where you can disband at the end of a production. Transitioning to that type of model in production has always been tantalizing, but it's not very friendly to the

existing staff I think in a lot of ways. In case anyone's interested as well, games teaching is not lucrative in any way shape or form, but it is guaranteed income so that’s nice. Bruce Thompson One thing I just wanted to just join in there John, is that gamification of medicine and the healthcare is actually becoming a big deal due to a couple of things. For starters, if you’re a surgeon, especially some cases like in neuro surgery and cardiac surgery, the difference between a catastrophic case and absolute amazing cases is a very fine line. A lot of surgeons at the end of it actually start using gaming to relax because it's just extremely stressful environment to be in. But the other end happens as well, where actually surgeons will do 15 minutes on a Wii game before doing an operation. We demonstrated it actually decreases complications and decreases surgical time mainly because you just improve your hand-eye coordination. Then it's the gamification of management of respiratory disease, only ten percent of the patients who have asthma take their medications. If they don't take the medications, they’re not going to get better. So they've been working on doing some app work on actually the gamification of management of your condition which leads to improved outcomes. So because we use all these weird words like exacerbation of asthma and any forming fibrosis, what does all that mean, we need to actually start using different terms and actually make it actually part of someone's way of life to be able to actually achieve better outcomes for the management of the condition. There's so many people who have asthma for example and they don't take any medications and that's why we still have deaths. So that's a very big area now where it's actually the whole gamification of your medical condition is actually becoming really important. John Hopkins Well that's incredibly interesting and using games to make patients more engaged in terms of managing drugs that they have to take or their plan that they been given by their doctors is incredibly interesting. Okay so obviously there'd be a lot of high school kids watching today interested in you know what careers might be had, what about people who were already working and retraining. Maybe we'll start with you Bruce, so in terms of someone who may have already started a career but they're thinking about changing what are the opportunities to get into health and how often does that kind of thing happen where people change from one career and move into health? Bruce Thompson That happens a lot and that's actually been quite the reason why the postgraduate courses in many areas of healthcare has actually been really important. So Swinburne we have postgraduate courses in Physiotherapy, OT and Dietetics and also postgraduate courses in Psychology as well. This is also for people who have either done an undergraduate degree who are trying to move into a specialized profession or actually have come from a different profession all together. People who have actually had a few years in a different career end up being amazing health care clinicians because they have a wider view of the world and we see that also in other areas that people will just have a major career change and then start getting into this area. We've also heard especially in this whole COVID pandemic that we might need to call people who have retired and actually start retraining them up again because we were concerned that we were not going to have enough nurses, physiotherapists and people who can handle ventilators that they were saying if you've just retired or you still got your registration then you're going to have to come back into the fold again. So there's definite need and the whole construct of actually having a career transformation is actually a really sensible thing to do. As I said these people make wonderful clinicians because they just think of the world slightly differently. John Hopkins Yeah look I see a lot of it myself and even say to my students, the decision that you made when you're 18 to go to university, the course that you're going to do and to set you up for a degree when you're 21 it's does not necessarily define your entire life and when you're 25, 30, 35, 40, 45 or whatever age, you want to change the way that employment is today you can do so there are always opportunities.

Bruce Thompson Absolutely I had someone that said to me that I think you really need to go down this pathway and I just said well hold on that's another five years’ worth of training. I’m very late 30s, family, couple of kids all that sort of stuff this is just crazy and they said well you probably graduated by the time you're 41 or so, you’ve got twenty four years of work ahead of you. When you think about that you go, you’re right think about the long game. John Hopkins I’ll ask the same question to Therese, so in terms of people who are moving from another career into teaching and education, does that happen a lot and if so the kind of opportunities are open for those people? Therese Keane It happens quite a lot and they also make exceptionally great teachers, unlike Bruce, who was talking about taking four or five years, we do that in two years’ time. So in two years’ time you could be a primary school teacher or you could be a secondary school teacher. I'm going to focus particularly on secondary school. If you've come from a different background whether it be engineering, whether it be from a nursing background or any other background, you basically have to find two areas that you can teach in. You look at your transcript so if you've come from nursing you might have a biology background, you might have maybe a chemistry background, you might have health and PE, or you might have human development. What happens is you look at the two majors that you could pick out and they're going to be the two areas that you'll be teaching in secondary school. So a lot of people do change their careers and they change it for a number of reasons. It could be that they start off at 18 and by 21 they decide it's not for them. Or they go off and they do things for ten years, fifteen years and they realize that it doesn't work with their family life. We have heard of engineers who don't want to do to fly-in fly-out for example or do shift work. They would prefer to have steady employment where its five days a week and normal hours or they would prefer to work locally as opposed to having to drive two hours today to their job. So different people choose teaching for different reasons and make changes in their careers, particularly in education we see it all the time. A lot of these people bring in different backgrounds, they bring in world experiences and they bring an element to the classroom that's really much needed for the students to actually have an appreciation and share the enthusiasm. John Hopkins I think it's really great for students when you have somebody who brings in those life experiences. I remember having a school teacher of mine who'd been in the Navy and the stories that he had, it was as educational as what we were learning for the lesson. So having great characters like that is a real plus. Next we’ll move to Damian, I’ll ask you the same question as well. Damian, do you find people move into gaming after having already started in different careers? And if so what kind of opportunities might be open to them and how do they do it? Damian Scott First off I'll say I love mature age students that come into our programs. I think they find that they've always been gamers despite whatever they've been doing up until that point and they’ve decided to make that plunge to come back. There's just so much that they bring to the table mixing with the other students who are fresh out of high school, it’s just really nice. So given that there's a diversity of skills out there, I've got a list here of producers, writers, programmers, IT, network administrators, artists, marketers, businesspeople, and actors all finding a home within these places. Even actors is interesting, it’s either voice acting or even performance capture acting now is really big. I think more than anything what is prized most in our industry is communication skills because we go through very long production cycles on games, sometimes two or three years, working on the same product day in day out. They can often have shifting design goals as well depending on how quality assurance is going with the work, and this demand of dynamic teams that demand trust, communication and common understandings, any producer will say is something that they basically nurture daily. I can tell you as a teacher doing these things as well, it's something that we do too so that's really good. It's also not so much individual skills in IT, it's also the collective and the pedigree of the team that

are things in demand. I think there was answers coming from Bruce and Therese that covered what I felt as well. John Hopkins Great thanks Damian, so there's definitely opportunities for people to switch into gaming. Excellent okay well we'll throw to the audience again back home and we'll launch our second poll question. We obviously would really like to hear your thoughts on what's been said so far, if you have any questions please feel free to answer the poll, it should be available on your screen now. Okay so we've looked at opportunities in three very different disciplines although it's obviously been some commonality in terms of some of the things that we've heard already so drilling maybe even further down maybe we'll go back to you Therese and we'll look at you know what are some of maybe the lesser-known career paths that people can forge with qualifications in education Therese Keane Thanks John, the obvious is going into a classroom and being a teacher but a lesser known one could even be one to one tutoring. I know people that started their own business outside so they do one-to-one tutoring after-hours. They can also work in museums so they could be tour guides, project officers, education officers, or work at zoos. They can also work in a variety of different places which requires school children to come through. They design curriculum and design programs to engage students as they come through for an excursion. They're just some of the ones that come to mind but obviously a lot of administrative tasks as well, like in universities where they need professional staff. Teachers make excellent administrators because they're very well organized, they have very good communication skills and are ready to talk through things to get people to work through tasks that they may not understand. There’s obviously in companies training roles as well as corporate training roles to train people within the organization. They're just some of the basic things that people can look at. There's obviously online learning as well where they can even be tutors on the other end. They can develop curriculum and other people to deliver it. Teachers can be very malleable might be the best way to describe it, the career is very malleable. They could move into a variety of different roles to help out. John Hopkins I like that word malleable. I remember reading a statistic, I can’t remember the exact figures, but it was about the number of law graduates that became lawyers, it was very low. There's obviously lots of other roles in careers out there for people with the law degree rather than just being a lawyer. Sounds very similar with education. Therese Keane It is. John Hopkins Okay so same to you Bruce. In terms of qualifications in the health space, what are the lesser-known career paths that might be open to people with those qualifications? Bruce Thompson That's exactly right so a lot of people who become a nurse, physiotherapist or even a scientist end up going into slightly different careers in the health care profession. One of the big ones that floats around is sales. In terms of pharmaceutical sales or device sales, these people need to understand, the actual drug, how it works, the actual condition, the pathophysiology of it and then on top of that they need to be great communicators. So people who will work in healthcare sales, they're not being like the sales person ‘hey look this is a really nice red one its way better than the other guys’, it doesn't work that way. It's very much actually here's the device, this is what this drug does, here's what all the research is, how much information do you need and how can we help you in terms of management of your patients, it's a different thing.

On top of that medical administration is also huge, I mean the current CEO of the Austin Hospital used to be a physiotherapist, the current CEO the Alfred Hospital used to be a nurse and they make fantastic senior administrators because there's nothing like being on the ward and actually understanding what is required. So when someone comes in and has an absolute meltdown, I know I've been there. They need to be highly organized and have other skills so a lot of people who might be a nurse end up doing a Masters of Health Administration or go to other types of business things. We do also have a double postgraduate degree as well where we can actually do business with health care. Then there's also the whole concept of health promotion and understanding why aren’t people taking their medications. So there's lots of areas from people who are actually clinicians that end up being wonderful researchers as well. Because they are the ones who have been sitting in with a patient, thinking say neuroscience that I've done all this treatment for all these years, there's no evidence to suggest that it works. Let me think about the study to actually demonstrate that it works or not. They're also the people who maybe have this person come in with something that they’ve never seen before and notice this is a new avenue of research. So you don't need to be medical doctor to do that. I mean I did that for thirty-five or thirty years where this is the clinical questions that we see day in day out, so let's try and find the answers. So can be everything from sales to actually hard line clinical research that we thought was more due to just one aspect of the profession. John Hopkins Thanks Bruce, it sounds like there's a great, wide spectrum of careers to people with qualifications in the health space. I’ll move back to Damian again and we've already touched on the flexibility of game skills in mental health, the applications there, and the gamification in other areas of health so it's not just your Call of Duty and this kind of thing. Can you identify other areas where people with applications and gaming maybe have a career? Damian Scott I think I was part of it initiative a few years ago that wanted to convert vocational learning into virtual reality modules. The idea was to take the best of anecdotal learning which we've mentioned here, you get that ex-navy person coming in and telling you stories about things that are happening on the workplace. Then to actually create those as scenarios that can have key possibilities and see just how we can use virtual reality now to really immerse a student in that experience and even observe how they're looking and how they’re behaving in that environment. Consider a game like Fortnite, many people would be very familiar with it. It's powered by the Unreal Engine which is multi-platform so you can have someone on an Android playing on a PlayStation. That technology is free to use, having your teacher enter a space that you're running a scenario in. They can be acting, they could be monitoring, there could be a whole range of scenarios that a whole bunch of people can join in to enrich that scenario to see just how you're performing. Right up to auditors from in-camera dropping in and having a look at what we're doing and making sure that it's ticking all their boxes. So it’s an enormously untapped area mainly because a holistic approach is complicated by the ever-changing technology. But that's starting to firm and some of the solutions that are coming through are really trying to capture the best of, as I call it anecdotal teaching, where we can model those wonderful scenarios that you just wouldn't believe it if you weren't there to see yourself. They're deeply beneficial for learners who are learning the orthodox way of doing things and then this is how we went really wrong and have a go to see how to do it. It’s not to replace learning it’s just part of the blended experience where you put that in there. We used to call it a marquee assessment where you enter into this and experience it and then have assignments either side of it to talk about that experience and how the fidelity of that experience matches up to real-life expectations. So definitely an enormous area there and Bruce mentioned gamification, the little smiley face for doing the right thing and taking your asthma medication, there’s so many opportunities out there. Just looking beyond games and really embracing your games technology, it seems to be something I'm telling my students daily with linkages to industries that we don't even know that they need games yet and then suddenly you can provide them with a solution that has never been cheaper. I think because of the way the industry is moving with licensing and other interesting things

Therese Keane I guess Damian you could also suggest IT teaching? Damian Scott I was going to mention that, yes, look for our industry we do get a lot of teachers that are still active in industry as well. It's why I'm where I’m at now, I'm doing a lot of my own work outside and feeding my practice back to my students and I'm finding that that's a vital process for both of us very much. It's just the TAE is what we call it at the PAVE level, it's one year of study and you can come in as long as you've got some really good industry experience as well. This obviously relates to what we're doing so not the two years that you were talking about and the five that Bruce had to endure but it's still pretty quick turnaround. John Hopkins Now obviously we've already mentioned earlier today that there's opportunities to change career. What you necessarily picked today is not necessarily the career that you will follow until you retire so it's not necessarily the be-all and end-all. However one needs to be nimble, adaptable and resilient to truly recession-proof your career. So how is each course designed to create future workers in this mould? We'll start with Bruce. Bruce Thompson Well one of the things we do with our courses is to provide a diversity within what we teach to actually create a more holistic clinician or holistic scientists. One of the things that comes immediately to mind is digital health. Digital health means everything from doing telehealth, similar to what we're doing now, through to actually using electronic medical records and how we actually convey information across in patients. With cystic fibrosis for example, they have a digital health card that the electronic medical record goes across everything so we teach all this sort of stuff. We do that for everyone, doesn't matter whether you’re health scientists or in biomed science versus being a dietician. So I think it's critically important because for anyone they need to make sure that their recession-proof, you need to potentially change to actually not make it yourself redundant. I regard myself as a scientist, I'll always will be a scientist. I started off doing airway mechanics type stuff but now end up in stem cell type work. Now I would never thought I was going to be a stem cell scientist like my whole knowledge I could fit on the stem cell, but to actually keep yourself relevant I needed to change. I think that's the same for all in healthcare and any type of profession. One of the good things with all of our courses, we actually give this huge, firm foundation for people who remember ‘hey I remember doing that course, I remember doing that subject, that actually that was really interesting and I think I might go down that path now’. The digital health example is the one that I think is actually across all of our courses. John Hopkins Ok and thank you Bruce. So we'll ask Therese the same question as well and also maybe throw in, how much if you studied education 10 years ago has the content of topics changed to what students will be studying today? Therese Keane Absolutely, education is dynamic and it keeps changing and it changes with the times, contemporary society and expectations. Expectations could be anything from political expectations or government funding. It could be worldwide issues, I mean if we look at COVID19 and the quick sudden change to working online and at home, no one would have predicted that. So in education you've just got to be flexible and that's one of the wonderful things about education. In a classroom you could be teaching, the next minute you could be listening to a guest speaker from somewhere who's absolutely inspirational, the next day you could be on a school camp that could be outdoors in the bush. So teaching has wonderful opportunities and wonderful experiences. You might also be taking kids overseas, obviously not in this climate, on study tours so you get you get to experience the world in the eyes of children and that really makes for interesting times. As I said earlier on in this session, our Masters of Teaching courses, whether it be a primary or a secondary course, are two years. Depending on what career you've come from you could possibly be able to take one of the two

master’s courses and become a teacher. Some of the things about Swinburne that really make us stand out is that our lecturers are generally teachers either come from the classroom, are still in the classroom or have recently left the classroom. We've got people who know what it's like to be at the coalface and provide examples when they're teaching, that's one of the advantages. We also have small classes so that people who are becoming teachers get the experience of working together with collegiality. I can say many more wonderful things but you know the professions great. John Hopkins That practical experience is so important. Damian so in terms of your particular course, how is that designed to create future workers in this model? Damian Scott I'm kind of lucky in the sense that I'm working at the Diploma level which is equivalent to first-year University. So there is an expectation certainly on my behalf of my students that you will go on to continue to study and we will use this time to work out which path in this industry that really suits you. Given that there are so many roles, I feel it's very easy for me to answer that. But at the same time, with all of the interesting linkages that are going on outside of games now, I don't even think I would be able to push students off into the right direction without really getting out a course guide for myself and saying this is where you need to go. Even with micro-credentialing, which is the new buzzword for us at the moment, in our industry we're constantly dealing with software upgrades and the price of staying current. These are things that are always encouraged with our students to make sure that they're going to always have the best solution to the problem that they present. I think it's presented to them from industry or the ones that they're challenging themselves with. John Hopkins And I imagine those micro credentials and certificates are really recognized in industry as well and help the students with their employability? Damian Scott Absolutely yes John Hopkins Ok thanks again Damian. One final question I'd like to ask everybody, maybe start with Therese, is obviously during COVID19 a lot of us have been working from home and not through choice. What we've seen is a lot of advantages of working from home and it's expected that there will an increase in demand for working from home in the post COVID19 era. Not necessarily working from home all the time but the ability to have some flexibility where we may be able to work from home a day or two a week. Do you see opportunities like that in education Therese? Therese Keane No unfortunately in teaching, teaching is an activity that has to be done in front of a classroom. Teachers need to be on campus, there’s supervision such as yard duty supervisions, recess supervisions, and library supervisions. There's a need for the person to be on campus and an obviously teach classes because you have to supervise the students in the class. You have to make sure that they're not hitting each other or they're not causing any disruptions. I guess I'm just focusing on some of the negativity's but the teacher has to be in front of class, there’s legal reasons for example. So it's not a simple case that a teacher can then just pack themselves up and teach from home when there is students are sitting in a classroom. Teachers will need to be on campus I'm afraid, so working from home is not going to be the norm in education. There might be one hour here or an hour there if you're not teaching, the principal may (I'm not going to say will) but may say to you look you can go home and work from home for that last period. The reality is that teachers will have to be on campus for most of the school day.

John Hopkins Okay thank you Therese. Damian I’d imagine it might be a little bit different in the gaming world? Damian Scott Absolutely, a very minimal disruption with many companies reporting that the transition to working home was pretty seamless with minor disruptions to the current schedule. You're also dealing with a bunch of game developers and gamers that are already online natives, they love the space, and it's just working for them. Many remember they're independent gaming roots where they were already collaborating with teams all over the world. They have this great idea and they've just pushed it out into the world and got the recognition and the job from there. I think Therese as well, as teachers in PAVE at that tertiary level, we're looking to continue our presence online at least for the remainder of the year even if it's with students that are in the class because it's time, and we can do it. It was that shock that it can happen and it actually isn't as scary as a lot of others thought it was, so we will have a residual presence online I think with everything that we teach. Mainly because our industry supports that a kind of experience. John Hopkins Excellent thanks Damian and same question, final question of the event actually, to you as well Bruce. Are there opportunities for remote workers in the health space? Bruce Thompson Absolutely and I think the answer is really yes and no. If you're a nurse who works in in coronary care at the Alfred Hospital, clearly working from home is going to be a bit of a tough call and it's not going to really happen. However, if you are a physiotherapist for example, telehealth is actually now becoming possible in some areas. Pulmonary rehabilitation, which is done by physiotherapists, can be done in the home with telehealth. My wife is a psychologist, clearly that's going to make it quite difficult in many cases for her to have face to face contact with clients so she has the opportunity to use telehealth. So it is possible in some areas. Now in some things that's actually just not as good however but it is possible. So depending on which area you work in really, so for me, it's changed a bit so I’ll probably be working at home for a bit, looking forward to it. John Hopkins Excellent great to hear from you Bruce. As always happens at these events, time has got the better of us and so I would really like to thank our three speakers as well as audience members at home. There is one last chance to take part in our final poll question which should be appearing on your screen. Hopefully you found this to be an insightful event, we've looked into what recession-proof careers might be, looked at opportunities within those discipline areas for study, what careers might be available to you and also what the extended network of different opportunities might be open to you if you study subjects or courses in that area. We've also delved into a few other questions around opportunities and the way skills might have changed as well so thank you very much for joining us. If you've enjoyed the event today, we do have some more events coming up so tomorrow we have Tech and Pandemics a review and then we have on the 17th of June, that's Wednesday, we have Redesigning Melbourne with an architect urban planner and smart cities experts and then on Thursday we have Help with Fees for places you might not have thought to look. If you want more details or you'd like to register for one of those events please go to swinburne.edu.au/infoevening. Thanks so much for joining us, hope you've enjoyed the event and have a great day.