Fourteen-year-old Aiden Hauck has ambitions to work in the tech industry but hasn’t quite narrowed down what he wants to do.
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The year 9 student at Alfred Deakin High School got a taste of the profession through a virtual work experience program in his school holidays.
“Tech always seems just like a big industry and you just don’t exactly know what you want to do and I feel like this has just given [me] an idea of what some of those jobs are,” Aiden said.
Tech Council of Australia has designed a virtual work experience program giving high school students the opportunity to experience what it’s like to work in jobs like software engineering, network engineering, cyber security and data science without leaving the classroom.
Students in years 8-12 and young people under 23 can complete online modules and watch videos of a day in the life of leading technology companies.
The program was launched in February 2024 in partnership with CommBank, Microsoft, NBN and Year 13, and has since been used by more than 3000 students from across the country.
At the end of the course, students are awarded a certificate for their resumes and future job applications.
Aiden said the virtual work experience has also helped him prepare for future in-person experiences.
“When I do job experience potentially next year or later this year, it’s given [me] an idea of what I want to experience,” Aiden said.
Tech Council of Australia head of ecosystem Scarlett McDermott said the program was designed to be accessible to students of all abilities and learning needs.
High school student Aiden Hauck. Photo by Karleen Minney
“We’ve put a lot of work into also making easy-to-read translations available and making sure that the website itself is really accessible for anyone who has a screen reader or might have some assistive technologies involved as well,” Ms McDermott said.
As someone who grew up in Canberra and went on to be a software engineer, she said the program was accessible to students in remote areas and aimed to help students understand that tech jobs existed in those areas.
“[We want] to make sure young people are getting the message that tech jobs aren’t just in the big city hubs in Sydney and Melbourne. Tech jobs are everywhere and you can have a tech job from where you live now, you don’t have to move away,” Ms McDermott said.
Alfred Deakin High School principal Brian Downton said the school wanted to prepare students for an ever growing job market in artificial intelligence.
“Those are the areas that students are really interested in as well, so they’re voting with their feet in that regard,” principal Downton said.
Although Aiden knows that he wants to pursue a career in technology, his advice for students who are unsure about the industry was to give the virtual work experience program a go.
“Even if it’s not for you, you then know it’s not for you and you know you’re not stuck thinking and wondering what could this job have been?” Aiden said.
