At MADA Design, a Design WIL Placement is undertaken as an elective unit. Upon successful completion, the student will attain 6 academic credit points for their efforts. Students have to submit a written report and diary for their WIL Placement to be evaluated and pass the unit/internship, with additional feedback provided by the supervisor.

While not recommended, our students can also potentially reach out to agencies/labs independently, outside the purview of Monash University, and choose NOT to enrol in this elective. Such 'internships' will not be considered for academic credit.

We recommend that our students seek out WIL Placements through our elective unit.

This academic credit award is closely related to Pt 2: Payment to students.

This is a topic that draws a good amount of debate, especially in the industry. For clarity, this discussion pivots around WIL Placements organised as an academic credit awarding unit, not generic 'internships' that students have arranged with agencies without involvement from Monash University.

Providing a monetary Prize / scholarship award may offer an incentive for applicants, and also address scenarios where transport and/or meals might present obstacles to the student(s) working on-site. It is important to note that this Prize or scholarship payment is for their educational expenses and living costs that enable them to undertake the placement, rather than being payment for services as an employee at the host entity.  It’s all about the student learning!

'PAID' WIL PLACEMENTS

WIL Hosts can offer 'payment' to successfully-selected students, as a way to encourage and recognise the effort and preparation made by the students during their application. This also tends to have a positive uptick on the level of dedication coming from the students, as it recognises their successful qualification and selection. In line with our selection process (see Step 3), providing a 'paid' WIL Placement may also attract high-quality students. This also includes self-sourced WIL Placements, where the student has approached a host on their own (but have also applied for the academic credit-awarding WIL Placement unit).

There are two different ways to offer a 'paid' WIL Placement:

1. Offering a one-off Prize or scholarship award to the WIL Placement student(s), to cover daily expenses, travel, meals etc. The WIL Placement student(s) carry out their WIL as students, taking on the placement as part of their studies.

2. Employing the WIL student, where you will need to follow minimum wage requirements and, where applicable, superannuation (see this ATO resource for details) according to your company's policy.

We'll support you through this process, but both payment options are ultimately left to the host to arrange.

'UNPAID' WIL PLACEMENTS

If a WIL Placement student is enrolled under our WIL Placement elective unit, and are therefore part of an academic credit-awarding unit, Fair Work stipulates that this can be unpaid as part of study or vocational placement.

For further details, please refer to the Victoria Fair Work Ombudsman on paid/unpaid WIL Placements.

While there is no legal stipulation to provide a paid WIL Placement in this scenario, we want to recognise the potential of such WIL Placements being misinterpreted as exploitation from the perspective of the public and students. While we communicate this clearly, we also suggest the provision of 'paid' WIL Placement options for the reasons mentioned above.

INDEPENDENT 'INTERNSHIPS' (OUTSIDE UNI ARRANGEMENT)

If a student applies for an 'internship' independently (i.e. not linked to any academic credit-awarding WIL unit), they must be employed and therefore follow Fair Work legislation, including the provision of insurance coverage and superannuation, where applicable.

For further details, please refer to the Victoria Fair Work Ombudsman.

This does NOT apply to students who submit self-sourced WIL Placements with the intention to enrol in the elective for academic credit. 

Part of the goal of this academic unit-linked elective opportunity is to provide assistance in the 'matching' of students with regularly-updated WIL Placement opportunities.

Having this centralised 'clearing house' consolidates our Design WIL Placement support efforts, and also provides a common resource and platform for industry partners/labs to register their interests. For agencies that run their own 'internship' program, we are happy to work with you to establish and align goals, work patterns and legal agreements, but the timeline must align with our semester dates.

We will also have to address the potentially significant confusion between 'WIL' and 'internships' before proceeding.

Beyond the opportunities we help to gather and publish (on this site), our students also have the option of seeking out self-sourced Design WIL Placements. Such options will also be assessed for suitability for Design WIL Placements, and this provides the same layers of support and pastoral care for our students engaged in WIL Placements.

Again, while not recommended, students can still seek out independent 'internships' on their own that are not linked to the academic credit-awarding unit. Such arrangements are the sole responsibility of the student.

The general requirement is to offer 80-100 hours of Design-related WIL engagement.

In a regular semester, this can be:

• 1 day (8hr) x 10-12 weeks, or

• 2 days (8hr each) x 5-6 weeks

If a Design WIL Placement is taken during the Summer / Winter study periods, we recommend the following work patterns:

• 3 days (8hr each) x 3-4 weeks

• 4 days (8hr each) x 3 weeks

• 5 days (8hr each) x 2 weeks

There can be flexibility in this arrangement, which is to be negotiated with the student(s).

In addition, students may not know their timetable schedule for an upcoming semester, and we encourage our students to communicate their availability as soon as practically possible. For our industry partners/labs, we seek your understanding in this.

To help mitigate this, if you have specific days of the week where you can host Design WIL Placements, please provide this in your request so that students can better preference their options.

Supervision

For regular semester placements, we recommend that Hosts provide weekly 1-hour supervision/feedback sessions with the student(s) – about 8 to 10 hours. We have found this to be an ideal tempo to maintain a good momentum throughout the WIL placement.

The Host supervisor should be able to advise on design work and/or project briefings. Our student(s) should be able to meet regularly with the supervisor to maximise their WIL experience. Multiple supervisors are fine especially if you have different projects/teams that rotate through.

For WIL Placements during the Summer/Winter periods, the relative shorter but higher intensity means you should set aside supervision time at shorter intervals.

As enrolled students, WIL Placement participants will have insurance coverage by Monash University to protect the students, interests and reputation of Monash University. In addition, Monash University requires a WIL Placement host to also have the following cover for our student(s):

Professional Indemnity Insurance: $10M
Public Liability Insurance: $20M

Please refer to Monash University's procedure on Industry Experience for more information.

For MADA Design, requests to waive insurance or make adjustments to these limits will unfortunately not be allowed.

If you intend to host the Design WIL Placement student as an EMPLOYEE of the company (refer to Point 2: Payment to students), the WIL Placement student's liabilities will fall under your company's insurance coverage, and these limits will not apply.

Depending on the type of WIL Placement project scope you have in mind, Monash University will send out these legal agreements to be digitally signed between the host, student and MADA (Monash Art, Design Architecture).

We recognise that this can take a bit of time to review, and have made samples of these agreements available in advance:

• WIL Placement with no research project

• WIL Placement with a research project

• WIL Placement where student is employed by Host (see Point 2)