Student perspectives on integrating industrial practice in risk and process safety education

Abstract

Strong links with industry are important for producing industry ready graduates. This is especially crucial when students are learnining about risk and process safety. Risk and process safety are taught in two courses at The University of Queensland. The first course is a compulsory 4th year course called ‘Risk in Process Industries’. The second course is an elective course offered at the Masters level called ‘Integrated Safety Design and Management’. Significant effort has been deployed to develop strong links between both these courses and industry. These links span the people, places, processes, problems and projects the students are exposed to. This article details these efforts. It also describes a survey of students’ perspectives to determine the efficacy of these efforts, and to identify potential opportunities to further improve the courses. Preliminary results from this survey revealed that the courses are changing the way that students think, and that they perceived them as being valuable in developing professional engineering competencies. Significantly, 97% (85 out of 88) of student respondents stated that the course will change the way that they think or act as a professional in industry. In their assessment of specific course content, students found case studies to be the easiest to understand, most interesting and most relevant to industry. Other insights gained, reveal opportunities for improvement that warrant further investigation.