Category / Latest

by brandsa2018

Northern exposure leads to increasing exports for Golden North ice cream

You would be hard pressed to find someone in South Australia who doesn’t enjoy the creamy taste of Golden North ice cream. However, the local market is only so big, and when the new SA owners came together 10 years ago the company’s key growth strategy was to look outside of their current postcode.

Trevor Pomery their director of marketing took on the additional responsibility for export sales, while the sales director expanded his focus to interstate sales.

Both streams have been a success and Golden North is now available in independent supermarkets across all Australian states and overseas, as well as through the foodservice market. Exporting to China, Malaysia, Cambodia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Nauru, Golden North is also in the process of finalising a new deal that will eclipse the current markets.

Golden North was recently voted Australia’s best ice cream maker for the second year running by a Canstar Blue survey.

“Australia is the ‘green food bowl’ for Asia,” Trevor says. “We have a reputation for being a clean, green supplier of food with good food security. Putting ‘Australian Made’ on the products is akin to adding a tick of approval.”

Trevor says most of the export deals have come about as a result of attending trade shows that have been held in Asia.

“Unfortunately, taking samples of ice cream with you when travelling is particularly difficult,” he says. “Even more so when visiting warm countries. I often think to myself how much easier it would be if I could just put a few samples in my carry-on luggage. But, ice cream needs to be kept at between -18C and -20C, so it’s a bit harder than that.”

The product sold to China uses the same recipe as the product consumers buy here. For the Chinese market, Golden North has also launched a green tea flavour, conducting taste tests with first-year Chinese university students living in SA in order to get the right balance.

“The most popular line we have for sale in China is the 125ml individual serve vanilla ice cream,” Trevor says. “Food shopping in China is done very differently than how we do it in Australia. Not everyone owns a refrigerator, so often ingredients are purchased on the day a meal is to be made and eaten. It’s not surprising that the individual serves are popular.”

Golden North’s marketing director Trevor Pomery says China has been a big export focus for the popular ice cream products.

Some historians believe that ice cream was actually invented in China, though it has only become popular there in recent years.

“Ice cream is certainly becoming more and more popular in China,” Trevor says. “Our sales continue to creep up and we are happy with the way our export market has grown slowly and steadily.”

Even with the increase in their market, Golden North is firmly rooted in their hometown of Laura, in the state’s Mid-North.

“Laura is our home – it’s where it all started,” Trevor says.

The regional town of Laura has been the home of Golden North since the 1920s.

The company began in 1880 when William Bowker and his family began selling milk and vegetables from their property. Later, in 1923 they began making ice cream there.

“The original homestead is still located on the property where our factory is,” Trevor says. “All our infrastructure is there. All our knowledge is there. Why would we move anywhere else.”

Golden North employs about 60 people at the factory, which in a township of 550 people is a large percentage of the eligible workforce. Many of the employees have been with the company for a long time.

“Our research and development manager, for example, has been with the company for 40 years,” Trevor says. “Our people and their expertise are located in Laura, so that’s where we are staying.”

Recent investments have been made to the factory to improve efficiencies and upgrade equipment such as the churns and freezers. This has allowed Golden North to increase production to cater for future growth.

Golden North Giant Twins are among the brand’s most popular products.

The raw ingredients used by Golden North are largely supplied by growers in SA’s northern areas, and Trevor says the company consciously supports other local businesses including for transportation, and packaging.

“Operating a national ice cream business out of Laura is challenging and while we encourage South Australians to buy local, we make sure we lead by example,” Trevor says.

Golden North has again been rated Australia’s number one ice cream following an independent customer survey by Canstar Blue. This is the second year in a row Golden North has won the consumer award.

“There are lots of ways to make ice cream, but we still believe the best way to do it is with fresh milk and fresh cream,” Trevor says. “Some call it the old-fashioned way, but we think it’s the best way. Importantly, we also don’t use any palm oil in our products (for environmental reasons) and our products are gluten and nut free.”

The simple formula is clearly a winner, and the Golden North taste is one which continues to gain appreciation the world over.

Got a good story idea? Nominate a story from your region.
Click here to nominate >>

These inspiring regional stories are made possible by:

Major Partner[logooos_saved id=”5491″]

Program Partners[logooos_saved id=”29687″]

Advertisement
by brandsa2018

Maggie Beer – the Barossa has been my secret long-term ingredient

Quince paste, pheasant paté and verjuice – food made famous in Australia by beloved country cook Maggie Beer who recently celebrated the 40th anniversary of her Barossa Valley pheasant farm and two of her iconic products.

This year marks four decades since Maggie and her husband Colin launched the farm shop on Pheasant Farm in Nuriootpa and began producing well-known favourites, pheasant farm paté and quince paste.

Using fresh, seasonal produce and making the most of what you’ve got has been Maggie’s ethos from the very beginning.

“I was very lucky to have been brought up in a household in Sydney where food was truly important and my father was passionate about produce,” she says.

“Even when there was very little money we always ate well and cooked everything from scratch but with great knowledge about food. We used every bit of the animal, we cooked offal and did all the things to make the most of whatever was available. I was brought up where beautiful (food) was the norm.”

2019 marks 40 years of Maggie Beer’s famous quince paste, which Maggie says is well-accompanied by cheese.

Maggie and her husband Colin left Sydney in 1973, returning to Colin’s much-loved South Australia and settling in the Barossa Valley. Previously, Colin had trained as a commercial pilot in New Zealand but upon returning to Australia found it hard to find work due to a lull in the industry.

The couple bought a working vineyard near Nuriootpa and established as a base to establish the breeding of pheasants. However, it wasn’t until Colin won a Churchill Fellowship to study game bird breeding in Europe and America, that they came across the idea of opening a farm shop to sell both fresh and cooked birds to show how beautiful they were that they began to be serious producers.

Maggie was able to work with the birds that Colin farmed and the seasonal produce of their Barossa neighbours. Within the year, they morphed into the Pheasant Farm Restaurant and began building the foodie empire her Barossa farm has now become.

Together, Maggie and Colin had adopted a ‘waste not want not’ ethos, with Maggie cooking everything she grew and making the most of every part of a vegetable or animal; making patés, terrines, and stocks.

Despite verjuice being around for thousands of years in Mediterranean cooking, Maggie became the first in the world to commercially produce the sour juice, which is made from unfermented grapes and used in salad dressing and glazing.

Verjuice and patés remain an almost every-day staple in her kitchen.

“I use it (verjuice) three or four times a week for glazing vegetables … it’s something I use in half of all the cooking I do to brighten flavours,” she says.

“Then paté is for entertaining usually, although one of my grandchildren, Ben, who is 11, comes every day from school, he has to have a paté sandwich. All my grandchildren grew up eating paté as the norm because it’s just so good for you and it’s full of flavour.”

Australian food icon Maggie Beer.

Maggie’s success over the years has spread not only throughout the Barossa, but across the nation through our TV screens as she is often appears as a guest judge on reality cooking show MasterChef. She also co-hosted ABC TV show The Cook and the Chef alongside prominent SA food identity and chef Simon Bryant.

The title of the series places Maggie as the cook, because surprisingly she’s self-taught and has no formal training as a chef. She calls herself a “produce-driven country cook” and is passionate about using home-grown produce where possible as well as sourcing produce from local growers.

“Nothing will taste better than what you have pulled out of your own garden, that’s nirvana,” Maggie says.

“But not everyone has a garden or time for a garden, so the next best thing is what is on your doorstep and in-season, the flavour and the nutritional benefits will always be greater.”

Maggie says she owes much of her success to the Barossa region, saying it taught her the value of seasonal produce as well as using all parts of a plant or animal when cooking.

“It’s been the luck of my life coming to the Barossa. Learning of the rhythm of the seasons and beginning with our own produce and the growers in our backyard; the Barossa has been my long-term secret ingredient.”

But with success comes change and earlier this year, Maggie sold the balance of her business to long-term investment partner the ASX-listed Longtable Group. Maggie continues to be the face of Maggie Beer products and works one week per month in product development.

“It’s been the perfect weaning off something that has been my life work,” she adds.

Keen to know Maggie’s favourite winter recipe? Click here. Hint: quinces.

Got a good story idea? Nominate a story from your region.
Click here to nominate >>

These inspiring regional stories are made possible by:

Major Partner[logooos_saved id=”5491″]

Program Partners[logooos_saved id=”29687″]

by brandsa2018

Kangaroo Island networks help bring fig wine vinegar to fruition

Dan Pattingale is a farmer who understands the necessity of innovating.

The Kangaroo Island orchardist, whose Stokes Bay property has abundant figs and olive trees, has cleverly designed many food products under The Figgery brand to address unexpected crop gluts, droughts and varying cost shifts that have affected his business.

However, he also knows that innovation alone will not sell his wares.

“I’m a hands-on farmer, but not a marketer,” admits Dan. “I need to get my products into people’s mouths to make them love what I produce, and to do that from somewhere as isolated as Kangaroo Island, I need a network.”

Dan Pattingale picks figs on his Stokes Bay property.

Dan has achieved this, largely thanks to the deliciousness of his products. Beyond producing exceptional extra virgin olive oil for the past 20 years, Dan has created sticky figs, and sold the preserving fluid as sticky fig syrup.

Now he is creating a unique fig wine vinegar that will be available from July.

“I can’t sell 12 tonnes of fresh figs that I harvest – they’re too delicate to transport – so I’ve got to keep thinking of new ways to prolong their shelf life.

Now I’ve got 200 litres of fig wine – it’s quite sweet and spicy – that I’ll be converting into fig wine vinegar. Sure, it’s different, but just having an interesting product from Kangaroo Island is not enough. It has to be exceptional and consistent – and available when customers want it.”

Dried and sticky fig products and the sticky fig syrup at the central market. The newest addition will be the fig wine vinegar from July.

Achieving this is difficult due to high freight costs, but Dan’s great allies have been Justin and Jane Harmon, who run the Kangaroo Island Stall in the Adelaide Central Market.

Since 2014, they have stocked more than 50 of Kangaroo Island’s boutique food and drink producers, providing a first opportunity for many to reach the Adelaide market.

Importantly, the stall also gave customers a first taste of The Figgery’s unique products, which triggered word of mouth demand.

The Figgery products are now distributed to 50 stores throughout South Australia, although Dan says the Kangaroo Island Stall is where he will officially launch the new fig wine vinegar.

“It’s been an essential supporter for small producers,” he says. “They’ve employed young people from the island; my daughter Nina still works there. It truly represents the island.”

Jane and Justin Harmon of the Kangaroo Island Stall in the Adelaide Central Market help promote island produce to city folk.

One more crucial cog is required to make boutique food production on Kangaroo Island a viable proposition – cost-effective distribution to the mainland.

Tiff Turner has filled this role by creating KI Complete, a food distribution and transportation service. The former general manager of Island Pure sheep dairy now makes weekly runs to Adelaide, ferrying goods from about 20 small producers (including The Figgery), and returns to the island the following day with supplies of artisan milks, breads, fruits and vegetables.

“I’ve seen first hand that freight costs can destroy a business on KI before it really gets going, but I also know that if we work together, we can solve a lot of the problems,” says Tiff.

“That’s why I decided to pitch in. I really want to see the island get ahead.”

Got a good story idea? Nominate a story from your region.
Click here to nominate >>

These inspiring regional stories are made possible by:

Major Partner[logooos_saved id=”5491″]

Program Partners[logooos_saved id=”29687″]

by brandsa2018

Artificial intelligence a game-changer for future jobs

From complex software systems that sort through medical data, to drones that monitor crop health, South Australian industries are embracing the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and cutting edge technologies.

International AI expert Dr John Flackett says SA is well placed to adopt AI and machine learning in health care, defence and agriculture sectors, providing new job pathways for future generations.

According to Dr Flackett, an AI researcher and co-founder of start-ups koolth and AiLab, we’re ready for the transformation but need to ensure we have policy and regulation in place.

“We have a really forward thinking start-up economy in SA and we have people interested in innovation,” he says.

“There are some fine opportunities for using AI, if we look at space, agriculture, tourism and healthcare. Having doctors look at hundreds, even thousands of x-ray images to try and spot cancers or health issues, when we can train machines to do that work in a fraction of the time.

“But I think it’s really important that when we apply AI to sectors such as healthcare we don’t take the human out of the link totally. When we’re using AI tools and techniques we have to think carefully about the way we’re using the technology.”

Dr John Flackett’s Adelaide-based AiLab assists individuals, academia, industry, communities and governments worldwide on how to navigate the complex field of AI.

The gradual take-up of new-tech is slowly making its way into workplaces, with the demand for AI talent set to grow in the state as entrepreneurship and innovation become key career opportunities in the future.

A number of industries and businesses are already thriving with AI and machine learning technologies including Adelaide-based company Presagen which recently raised $4.5 million in seed funding to market its AI medical technology that improves fertility outcomes for IVF couples.

The product, Life Whisperer, uses a cloud-based analysis platform that improves the accuracy of healthy embryo selection in IVF treatments.

AI-driven technologies are also emerging in the agricultural industry, with drones carrying sensors and infrared mapping capabilities used to assess crop health and give a clearer picture of crop yield.

Dr Flackett, also a software engineer, has more than 20 years’ experience in AI, achieving a PhD in AI (machine learning and natural language processing) in 2005. Migrating to Australia from the UK around the same time, he co-founded smart web specialist company koolth before embarking on his second business venture, AiLab, with co-founder Emma Berry.

Dr Flackett regularly runs AI workshops and presents at events in the UK, Europe, the US and Australia to help demystify the world of AI and educate people on how it can empower businesses and transform how we live. The role of AiLab is to assist individuals, academia, industry, the community and government across the globe on how to navigate the complex field of AI and stay up to date with relevant progressions via education programs.

Dr Flackett says the field of AI – a term coined in the 1950s – is thriving “because humans have always wanted to automate tasks and build machines that can help”.

“AI as a field is really about that lofty goal of ‘can we build machines that are as intelligent as us?’ That’s called artificial general intelligence,” he says.

While Dr Flackett believes that the take-up of AI will be a huge disrupter to industry and workplaces, the key is to “not take the human out of it”.

AI is used in the ag-tech industry through drones that can assess crop health and give a clearer picture of crop yield.

“Personally, my approach is to embrace the advances and work with the technology. But you can’t take the human out of the process. You can’t get that personal customer experience with AI, so we need to be looking at AI to help inform our decisions, free up our time to interact with people and collaborate with others.

“The thing about automation and AI is that it drives a collaborative approach to jobs. For instance, the development of smart drones … in order to build such a system, many companies need to collaborate. If we’re producing AI-based image recognition technology we probably wouldn’t want to build the actual drone so we’d collaborate with a company that builds drones and then we’d supply the AI software skillset.

“I think that’s what we’ll start to see around future jobs, those skills sets of people being able to collaborate and communicate.”

Dr Flackett, who recently founded and organised Adelaide’s Artificial Intelligence meetup series, sponsored by AiLab and the Australian Institute for Machine Learning, says more work is to be done to encourage more investment into AI in Australia, and to develop policy and regulation.

He says SA is already ahead in nurturing talent for transforming industries as we have a highly skilled workforce that is ready to transfer its skills into emerging industries such as space and ag-tech.

Dr Flackett also explains that future employment pathways for today’s young people are likely to be varied and take more than one route.

“I refer to future jobs rather than future careers,” he says. “The career path that we’re used to is disappearing … according to the FYA (Foundation for Young Australians) people leaving school are going to have 17 different jobs, that whole career for life is virtually gone now.

“What we need to do is leverage the skills we already have, and transfer these skills to a rapidly changing workplace.”

Industry in focus: Careers of the Future

Throughout the months of May and June, future careers in South Australia will be explored as part of I Choose SA.

Embracing innovation, creativity and an understanding of building quality partnerships with technology is key to ensuring career opportunities in the future. SA is taking necessary steps to equip future generations with the skills for future careers and current workforces to transition to the future industries.

Read more Careers of the Future stories here.

Visit I Choose SA to meet the people building business and industry in SA, and to find out how your choices make a difference to our state.

[logooos_saved id=”13411″]

[logooos_saved id=”37805″]

by brandsa2018

SA’s chief entrepreneur helps new talent take flight

An early career as an elite air force fighter pilot led to the state’s Chief Entrepreneur building a global defence company with 700 employees, now he is helping the state’s next generation find their wings.

“If young people want to see themselves having a high-flying career they can go and work for a really large company,” Jim Whalley says. “Or they can create their own careers and their own companies from here that hopefully will go global.”

The chair and co-founder of defence company Nova Systems believes the state is the ideal training ground for young South Australians to choose the career path that involves building their own businesses. This, he says, is a state founded on a spirit of entrepreneurship along with social and religious freedom.

“Look at the Smith brothers for example, they flew from London to Australia (in 1919) but had to find their own finance, source their own aircraft, it was entrepreneurship to get the aircraft here but also to get support for the project,” Jim says.

“I think if you look at the number of Nobel Laureates per capita in SA, if we were a country we’d sit somewhere between Sweden and Switzerland, we’re somewhere in the top 10%. This is just the sort of spirit that we want, we’ve got the capability, the technical support.”

And Jim says there is strong financial support from the State Government.

SA’s Chief Entrepreneur Jim Whalley says the state has strong support for start-ups, entrepreneurs and innovation.

Budding entrepreneurs have access to funding for start-ups, space innovation, there is an export accelerator and venture capital fund along with precincts being created across Adelaide for start-ups that help accelerate them to commercialisation.

The new Lot Fourteen precinct on the former Royal Adelaide Hospital site in the city for example is leading the way as it is transformed into a neighbourhood entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Jim says the idea is to support innovative ideas and develop a state that is resilient.

“I’m a big believer in chaos creating an opportunity, the more change there is the more opportunity for companies that can think on their feet and enforce development and change.”

He believes jobs of the future “will be unpredictable” with a strong digital focus and the next generation is likely to change their employment paths more regularly.

“Coding for example will, I think, be something everyone will need to understand, it will be part of the curriculum like other languages,” he says. “Those who think and perform well in the future will need to be comfortable with high levels of uncertainty, to be able to think disruptively and think differently and think entrepreneurially.”

His own company Nova Systems started in SA as a defence company and now also has three offices in the United Kingdom, one in Singapore, Norway and Ireland. It has contracts working on Future Submarines, the Air Warfare Destroyers, and Joint Strike Fighter project but also in other industries including oil, gas and mining projects.

Jim Whalley is a former air force fighter pilot and test pilot.

Jim says he stepped down as CEO a few years ago after asking staff member Greg Hume “do you want to have a go at running the company?”

“It sent a very clear message to the middle management team that they could be CEO one day and whilst the company was a private company you didn’t have to be a member of the family to be a senior manager. We’ve got about 700 staff members now and I would like to reach the 1000 mark in the next two to three years.”

Jim was made the state’s first Chief Entrepreneur last year, and in his role is supporting a $6.3 million pilot program for the state’s public high schools that was created by the Entrepreneurship Commercialisation and Innovation Centre at the University of Adelaide.

It involves creating five specialist entrepreneurial high schools with State Government backing and “is about kids that have a little bit of entrepreneurial spirit getting a little bit of a leg up”.

“Basically it’s about giving them a bit of freedom to start businesses through courses, experimentation, to go and write a business plan and complete some leadership courses, to have a financial understanding about the things you need to know,” he says.

“It’s about coming up with an idea and knowing how to act on it.”

Jim thinks the environment is right for the state to continue building on its commitment to a strong entrepreneurial ecosystem that will support a dynamic economy.

“We live in one of the best countries and best states in the world. We want for very little and and we have people who are more than capable of operating on a world stage,” he adds.

Industry in focus: Careers of the Future

Throughout the months of May and June, future careers in South Australia will be explored as part of I Choose SA.

Embracing innovation, creativity and an understanding of building quality partnerships with technology is key to ensuring career opportunities in the future. SA is taking necessary steps to equip future generations with the skills for future careers and current workforces to transition to the future industries.

Read more Careers of the Future stories here.

Visit I Choose SA to meet the people building business and industry in SA, and to find out how your choices make a difference to our state.

[logooos_saved id=”13411″]

[logooos_saved id=”37805″]

by brandsa2018

Miranda sisters produce an ideal winery blend

An ideal blend of skills has placed three sisters at the helm of Lou Miranda Estate in the Barossa. Since 2005, Lisa and Victoria Miranda have steered business at the winery that carries their father’s name, but the recent arrival of their sibling Angela as winemaker, bringing more than a decade of international experience, makes the family business complete after a careful 14-year progression.

Angela, who was previously Pernod Ricard’s UK packaging operations manager, US packaging operations manager and technical operations manager in the Barossa, came back to her family’s winery at Rowland Flat in mid-February – after vintage had already started – and acted fast to ensure the family’s progression as a boutique wine brand continues.

“We’d always intended for Angela to join us, but she was reluctant to leave her previous position which saw her travelling most of the year to emerging wineries in China, India and New Zealand,” says Victoria. “Once she came back to work in the Barossa, the decision to join us just seemed like a natural fit.”

The Miranda sisters, Lisa, left, Miranda and Angela of Lou Miranda Estate in the Barossa Valley.

It’s the latest step in a long journey for Lou Miranda’s family, which moved to the Barossa from Griffith in 1991 so that the former Miranda wine brand (which was then among Australia’s larger family-owned wine companies) could access more high-quality fruit.

The big old winery building, erected in 1919, became a weekend playground for the young Miranda girls while their father and mother worked, and later became their own workplace, after they turned 18, as they each took turns serving at the cellar door.

It provided them with a useful skill set when big change came after McGuigan Wines bought the Miranda label in 2003, splitting the broader Miranda family’s wine connections.

For a while, Lou’s family continued to sell Miranda wines from the cellar door, but in 2005, they transformed the Barossa property into a separate identity as Lou Miranda Estate – and Lou’s daughters stepped to the forefront of the business, with Lisa drawing on her sales background and Victoria bringing graphic design skills.

“Dad wasn’t ready to retire, and he had no problem at all with his girls taking the reins,” says Lisa. “We had always been involved in everything along the way. We never thought of ourselves as girls facing any obstacles. We were simply this family’s next generation, moving the business forward.”

Lou Miranda handed the reigns of the boutique winery to his three daughters Lisa, Victoria and Angela.

It was daunting to start again – “We had zero customers, and now we are selling 25,000 cases per year” – but the daughters say they had Lou’s complete confidence to build the business on the back of his experience and their fresh ideas.

Their foundation was the winery at Rowland Flat – previously the Liebich family’s Rovalley winery, which had passed through several sets of hands, but still had the same infrastructure and – more importantly – large reserves of the fortified wines that Rovalley was famous for, stored in the original 7000-litre oak vats that the Liebichs had constructed in 1919.

Angela has revived her fortified winemaking skills, learned through such luminaries as David Morris (Morris of Rutherglen) and Philip Laffer (chief winemaker at Jacob’s Creek), because fortified wines still hold strong appeal for cellar door customers, and was the focus of fortified masterclasses held in the winery during the recent Barossa Vintage Festival.

Many more treasures have greeted Angela in the winery – including fruit from serious 90-plus-year-old shiraz vines (the best being reserved for the $150 Master Piero shiraz, named after Victoria’s first son), and recent plantings of pinot grigio and sagrantino grapes. “Lou was interested in adding Italian varieties but didn’t want to do the same as everyone else,” explains Lisa.

It’s a surprise for these wines to appear in the Barossa, especially a bright, crunchy pinot grigio built in the authentic Italian style around a firm acidic spine. Even more impressive is sagrantino made light and spicy with bright blueberry and liquorice flavours, rather than being heavy and overly tannic as many of these wines from Umbria in Italy are made.

Equally impressive is old vine grenache made in a lively style with juicy raspberry held in check by firm tannins; and a rich blend of old vine shiraz and mourvédre from the 110-year-old Angels vineyard at Lyndoch.

Many wine drinkers remain unaware of these changes, as the family’s popular Leone brand has primarily been noted for its value wines, and the elite Lou Miranda Estate wines are largely a mystery.

The challenge now is for the three sisters to promote these new wines through marketing initiatives that include in-home tasting parties, where a staff wine consultant presents the Lou Miranda Estate and Leone wine ranges for groups of up to eight guests in their homes.

“We have a lot to do,” says Angela, who adds that the full extent of the Miranda sisters’ work won’t be immediately evident, because the cruel 2019 vintage has produced scant volumes of fruit – including a paltry 300 litres (one barrel) of old vine shiraz. “Our best,” adds Angela with a grin, “is yet to come.”

Visit I Choose SA to meet the people building business and industry in SA, and to find out how your choices make a difference to our state.

[logooos_saved id=”13411″]

Got a good story idea? Nominate a story from your region.
Click here to nominate >>

These inspiring regional stories are made possible by:

Major Partner[logooos_saved id=”5491″]

Program Partners[logooos_saved id=”29687″]

by brandsa2018

SACE structure shaping our students for future jobs

Space, technology, creative industries, healthy ageing, all careers dominating the state’s future – but South Australia also wants its students learning to be first rate human beings.

It is a bold message from the chief executive of the hugely important SA Certificate of Education (SACE) Board, the group shaping more than 100 subjects available to Year 11 and Year 12 students.

Professor Martin Westwell says the board wants the state’s students to have access to important subjects but also to learn to be flexible, solve problems and importantly, apply their knowledge.

He quotes the esteemed director of education for the international Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Andre Schleicher, who was in Adelaide for a national conference for educational assessors in April.

“He warned that if we keep focusing on proficiency alone we will be developing second class robots and not first class humans,” the SACE Board CEO says. “We want to develop first class humans.”

Prof Westwell says there are high-profile industries developing in SA including world-class health research, the space industry, advanced manufacturing using high technology, and creative industries ranging from festivals to film.

More traditional industries like mining and resources, education and healthy ageing are also likely to remain strong employers, but Prof Westwell says students must be prepared for uncertainty.

“There was a Deloitte report that came out a few years ago showing the shelf life of skills is getting shorter and shorter,” he says.

That is why young people need skills to have careers rather than long-term jobs, Prof Westwell says.

“(For example) teams will become more important so we’ve got diversity, having proficiency in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) will be important. But you will also need skills to influence people, to support decision making to help people to imagine the imaginable so that it becomes (possible).”

Prof Westwell’s own career has followed unexpected paths; he was born into a long line of electricians in north-west England but turned out to be more academically suited.

SACE Board CEO Professor Martin Westwell says diversity in students education is important in preparing them for future careers. Photo by JKTP.

He studied at Wigan Mining College before winning a place at the esteemed Cambridge University to study chemistry including completing a PhD in biology chemistry before moving to Oxford University as a research fellow.

Work at a drug company spun out of the university followed, then Prof Westwell led a research project looking at how technology changes the way people think for the Research Institute for the Future of the Mind at Oxford University.

In 2007, he was lured to Flinders University after having visited SA with his wife who is a teacher, and the two deciding it was the right place for their careers and also bringing up their two sons now aged 17 and 21.

Prof Westwell was made director of the Flinders Centre for Science Education in the 21st Century, working on getting research to have maximum impact on the community. One project involved improving education results in schools.

“We worked with every public school in Port Augusta, pre, primary and high school, looking at young people’s cognitive learning to improve numeracy,” he says.

“In the high school when we started they were getting just over 60% of students reaching the national minimum for proficiency and that changed to more than 90%.”

Prof Westwell was a board member of SACE for five years before taking on the role as CEO in January 2018, tasked with overseeing $10.6 million in funding to transform the SA Certificate of Education.

In this time there has been renewal on the SACE Board, the first of Year 12 electronic exams and work on subject renewal for more than 60 subjects with one major focus.

“We’ll be asking students to put their knowledge into practice,” Prof Westwell says.

“We now quote Tony Wagner from Harvard University, ‘the world no longer cares what our students know, it cares about what they can do with what they know’.”

There are also plans to involve industry in developing new future jobs subjects including cyber security. Prof Westwell wants to build a system where employers and investors can know students who study the SACE know more than the basics, “I want them to be able to really infer something about young South Australians”.

“When we have a complex and uncertain job future we need expertise, we need flexibility, diversity,” he says.

“I think professionally, SA education is world leading in many ways and the way in which we go about it in this state is unusual, it is done by partnership, there’s a real feeling that we are all in this together for the success of our students.

“I think personally, one of the key drivers for us to coming to SA is we wanted our kids to have their childhood here, it’s a fantastic place to grow up, there’s a great education system here.”

Industry in focus: Careers of the Future

Throughout the months of May and June, future careers in South Australia will be explored as part of I Choose SA.

Embracing innovation, creativity and an understanding of building quality partnerships with technology is key to ensuring career opportunities in the future. SA is taking necessary steps to equip future generations with the skills for future careers and current workforces to transition to the future industries.

Read more Careers of the Future stories here.

Visit I Choose SA to meet the people building business and industry in SA, and to find out how your choices make a difference to our state.

[logooos_saved id=”13411″]

[logooos_saved id=”37805″]