Skills and assessment necessary in a co-operative education maritime engineering program

Maritime industry and academia constantly battle to provide seamless transition from undergraduate to professional engineer. Co-operative education (co-op) programs endeavour to bridge this divide by ensuring undergraduates experience current industry practices and procedures throughout their undergraduate program, confirming co-op graduates ability to ‘hit the ground running’ upon completion of undergraduate studies. Success of co-op type programs as a form of Work Integrated Learning (WIL) is reliant on structured and authentic assessment to ensure development of required skills. The challenge exists to ensure this is maintained within work placements which occur outside the academic institute. This paper investigates the processes utilised within the National Centre for Maritime Engineering (NCMEH) at the Australian Maritime College (AMC).