Perth students recently explored the world of defence careers through the Dive into Defence program, a hands-on initiative developed by CCIWA’s Defence Nexus in partnership with Curtin University.
Hosted in Curtin’s immersive Hive room, the program aimed to showcase lesser known but vital occupations that support Australia’s defence sector.
Students from Greenwood College, Warnbro Community College, South Coast Baptist College, Halls Head Senior High school, Yule Brook College, Frederick Irwin College and Belmont City College took part in the immersive experience designed to showcase vocational and university pathways into deference-related industries.
The initiative was co-developed by CCIWA Education Development Fund Advisor Jonni Taylor and CCIWA Defence Nexus Advisor Darren Beadle. Together, they created a hands-on experience designed to help students explore career pathways in areas often overlooked when thinking about defence, from cyber security to geospatial science.
The students learnt about VET pathways including school-based traineeships/apprenticeships in electronics, engineering, aviation, information technology and cyber security.
Kyle Norton from Curtin University explained the pathways in mechatronic engineering, geospatial intelligence and data science.
Wade Langford and Harsh Talathi from Innovaero discussed their exciting career journeys and got the students to play a ‘guess the part of the aeroplane game’ with prizes for successful answers. Many of the students had great aviation knowledge.
Denis Coldham from CyberCX spoke about well-known cyber-attacks that have happened in Australia including the Medibank and Optus attacks.
The students learnt about the dangers of the dark web and how having better password hygiene can protect your data. Coldham demonstrated to the students just how easy it is to hack into systems, explaining that some previous national cyber attacks were been done by students their age.
The students then played a defence-centric occupation bingo game, where Taylor read out some very specific job functions and the students had to guess the occupation.
After the presentations the students were free to check out Innovaero’s drones and the 3D screens in the Hive room.
Find out more about CCIWA’s Education Development Fund or via our Facebook page at Students@CCI.
