This programme is aimed at preparing people to "make a difference" in many different contexts, including business, social enterprise, community, and potentially hapū and iwi. It is largely self-directed and individually tailored, with the aim of developing each individual learner's emergent profession:
● For new roles that haven't yet been created
● For hybrid roles
● In diverse and changing contexts faced by a range of current roles
Instead of a traditional discipline, learners are given the opportunity to develop their own professional frameworks of practice. The programme is targeted at school leavers, or people without significant professional experience.
The purpose of this programme is to meet the needs of learners, communities, enterprises, and other groups in professions in an unknown future, where professions are not yet established, but are emerging as hybrids of current professions, or as novel professions emerging from innovation. This purpose can also be framed as meeting the needs of learners who want to develop a practice that is not well captured by current professions.
The programme will not only address the need for future employees with the skills and knowledge to work in as yet undefined professions, but also the transferable skills to adapt and create an impact in a constantly changing context.
> See Ideal first jobs
> See Exit strategy
Graduate Profile:
On completion of the qualification, graduates will be able to demonstrate the following competencies and capabilities to make a difference in communities, enterprises and environments:
1 Apply competencies and capabilities to enable transformational change in communities, enterprises and environments.
2 Integrate an appreciation of the bicultural context of Aotearoa New Zealand and the Treaty of Waitangi within an emergent professional framework.
3 Articulate ethical and sustainability frameworks such that they act as sustainable practitioners.
4 Recognise and incorporate one’s own values, mindsets and biases within a grounded theoretical framework.
5 Create and maintain healthy relationships and collaborations in communities and organisations.
6 Synthesise experiences, capabilities and competencies to create an emergent professional framework of practice.
See > Capabilities approach
See> Mapping of Graduate Profile to Learning Outcomes to Courses.
> See Making a difference
This degree focuses on the learner and on processes of learning and professional practice. While this may apparent in all degrees, it is the explicit motivation and underpinning of this one. The usual content-centred description is replaced with a description of a process that supports learners towards articulating and providing evidence of achievement of their own emergent professional framework of practice.
We have paid particular attention to the risks that might come from such an approach. We have consulted very widely, repeatedly asking people to identify risks and then designing the programme to mitigate these risks. We have followed a human-centred design approach to learning design, including applying a set of personas as crash-test dummies to all aspects of the programme. We invite the reader to consider a conceptualisation of the programme which moves beyond ‘vocational’, ‘taught’, ‘distance’ or discipline-specific areas. We hope that this degree is a game-changer in that its focus is on capability development within a body of knowledge which is determined by the learner as appropriate to their intended area of practice We have worked hard to ensure that the degree is rigorous, robust and pedagogically sound.
While professional practice qualifications such as the Graduate Diploma of Professional Practice, Masters of Professional Practice, and the soon to be delivered Doctor of Professional Practice meet many of the needs of graduates, employers and communities, there is a significant gap in provision of professional practice qualifications for learners who do not already hold a level 7 tertiary qualification or do not have existing skills and experience at an equivalent level. This degree addresses the opportunity of a professional practice degree for young learners by providing the experiences to enable an Independent Learning Pathway. A focus of the degree is learning from a curated set of practice experiences.