Virtual Reality Empowering Students to Make Insightful Career Choices

Read the original article here on Advance Queensland’s website.

Brisbane-based startup Work Window is reshaping the way students consider their career options with an exciting virtual experience that gives them an accessible and interactive experience of job roles and workplaces across a diverse range of industries.

Over 43,000 students in 66 schools and organisations across Australia are using the technology which currently has 27 different careers to explore, including civil engineering, physiotherapy, firefighting, cotton farming, pharmacy, industrial design, accountancy, and carpentry.

To access them, students use a virtual reality (VR) headset to shadow and interview a professional in the field with an opportunity to ask their own questions about the role and industry.

The company works with professional bodies and businesses to put the VR experiences together and has collaborated with Queensland Urban Utilities, Lendlease, CSIRO, Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service, Cotton Australia, Energy Queensland, Thomson Adsett, and MacWest Construction – to name just a few.

Work Window is the brainchild of Cam Martin who drew on his own experience as an engineering student trying to figure out which branch of the discipline he wanted to pursue.

“I reached out to several local engineering companies to see if I could arrange job shadowing to learn more about the day-to-day realities of my different options,” Cam said.

“But unfortunately, no one took me up on my request. It quickly became apparent that it was not commercially viable for industry to dedicate any significant time to providing job shadowing opportunities to students.”

He said to make matters more difficult, neither he nor his parents had any industry contacts, so these frustrations were the catalyst for a virtual reality solution.

“I realised that you could get many of the same insights and benefits from undertaking a job shadowing experience in virtual reality as you would in person,” Cam said.

Work Window was established in 2019 and their VR software developed entirely in-house. In 2023, the company won a $50,000 Advance Queensland Private Sector Pathways Challenge that sought an engaging way to inspire the next generation of tourism leaders.

The Private Sector Pathways Program aims to solve corporate challenges with solutions generated by innovative Queensland SMEs and scaleups.

This challenge was set by the Tourism Division of the Department of Tourism, Innovation and Sport. Attracting students to a career in tourism is particularly important in Queensland as the industry employs one in 15 Queenslanders and contributes $10.3 billion directly to the Queensland economy, accounting for 2.3 per cent of Gross State Product.

Work Windows will create up to five experiences showcasing career paths in tourism and hospitality, including the roles of chef and hotel manager, along with marketing and events, adventure tourism, and marine tourism.

“Our Production Team has captured most of the content for our Tourism and Hospitality career experiences, and they’re about to enter post-production,” Cam said.

“The goal is to meet the challenge objective by early 2024. We’re excited to equip Young Tourism Leaders with these experiences and to make them available to young people using Work Window.”

Cam explained that Work Window is on a mission to help people discover their dream careers while enabling companies and industries to attract their future workforce.

“Reaching beyond existing career resources – our virtual reality experiences transport users into the workplace to provide an interactive and authentic hands-on experience that engages students and leaves a lasting impact,” Cam said.

“By increasing awareness and interest in high-demand professions, we can help address the skills’ shortages faced by many industries across the economy and meet the needs of the workforce now and into the future.

“We’re currently taking on new partnerships with forward-thinking organisations to build long-term talent pipelines by promoting consideration of career paths in their industries.”

The global market for immersive technologies is predicted to exceed US$2.6 trillion by 2031 and Queensland startups are making huge advances in the industry.

Learn more about our Private Sector Pathways program and how we’re creating commercial opportunities for innovative Queensland businesses.