As Australia accelerates its transition to a cleaner and low-carbon economy, one challenge looms large: building a workforce with the skills, experience and confidence to lead that transition. For industry, this is more than just a talent shortage, it’s a strategic opportunity. Companies need graduates who understand sector realities, commercial constraints and the rapid pace of innovation.
TRaCE is helping address this challenge through a suite of education and training pathways. Among these initiatives, the Work Integrated Learning (WIL) program stands out.
At UNSW, WIL placements give students degree-credited experience working directly on industry-relevant challenges, with placements running anywhere from ten weeks to six months. By collaborating with the university, industry partners access students eager to apply their academic knowledge to real project environments. This collaboration enables businesses to test ideas, progress research, and develop innovative solutions while simultaneously shaping a pipeline of skilled, job-ready graduates with practical, hands-on experience.
For engineering students, placements are a required part of their degree, yet meaningful placements, particularly in specialised clean energy and recycling sectors, can be difficult to secure. Over two years, TRaCE has filled this gap by acting as a “concierge service,” helping 11 students secure placements with clean energy industry partners and building opportunities tailored to partner needs, research priorities, timelines and workforce demands. This support also extended to reducing financial barriers through the TRaCE WIL Placement Bursary, ensuring students can complete their placements without additional financial stress and partners benefit from a broader and more diverse cohort of talent.
Hannah’s story: From placement student to aspiring researcher
For chemical engineering student Hannah Wah Day, the WIL Placement became a defining moment in shaping her career direction.
In 2024, she came across an opportunity in her faculty newsletter for a TRaCE-supported WIL placement with Associate Professor Pramod Koshy’s Novel Engineered Materials for Conventional and Applied Technologies (NEMCAT) research group. The timing, she recalls, “was perfect.” After completing smaller research projects earlier in her degree, she was eager to understand how academic work aligns with industry needs. The placement gave her that insight immediately, immersing her in an environment where partner feedback, project scope and budget constraints shaped the direction of the research.
For research-focused WIL placements like Hannah’s, the value goes beyond giving industry partners extra project support as they also help shape future researchers who can collaborate effectively with industry and approach scientific problems with a commercial lens. “Working alongside our project leader Dr. Yue Jiang, I got to see what he prepared for meetings with industry partners and then hear the feedback they’d give afterwards,” she says. “Sometimes they’d redirect us because parts of the research were out of scope or out of budget. It gave me a whole new perspective I hadn’t been exposed to before.”
That perspective was reinforced through her hands-on work. Hannah joined a project developing technology that produces hydrogen from seawater using a synergism of light, ultrasound and a patented catalyst, with her role focused on conducting experiments that would help scale the technology toward practical use. She fabricated and characterised the catalyst, then tested its performance by exposing various seawater–catalyst mixtures to UV light and measuring the hydrogen produced after each run.
As she increased the volume of seawater, a key step in scaling up the technology, she noticed changes in efficiency from alteration of UV light penetration and resultant excitation of the catalyst. “It pushed me into more problem-solving than I expected,” she says. She experimented with different vessel shapes, heights and UV lamp intensities to find a setup that worked more effectively at a larger scale.
A Pathway to Impact
For students like Hannah, the TRaCE WIL Placement is more than a degree requirement – it is a launchpad. It allows them to apply their academic skills in real-world settings, gain industry experience and grow their professional networks. By working alongside industry leaders, students build confidence, sector awareness and clarity about their career path, accelerating their transition from learners to capable early-career professionals.
For Hannah, the placement opened the door to an ongoing research assistant role. She is currently working on a project that explores how industrial waste materials can be repurposed as a more affordable alternative to conventionally mined minerals.
“As a research assistant, Professor Koshy has given me the freedom to read up on relevant studies and suggest new directions for the experiments,” she says. She now takes on greater responsibility for collating, interpreting and analysing data, giving her experience that strengthens both her technical skills and her confidence as an emerging researcher.
“The skills I picked up are transferable and I use them in my current role all the time,” she says. “The program really opened my eyes to the different pathways in research and definitely strengthened my interest in pursuing it further.”
Her story reflects TRaCE’s broader vision: creating meaningful learning opportunities that strengthen Australia’s talent pipeline while giving industry partners access to students who are ready to contribute from day one.
