The professional nursing and construction curricula

In Australia, as in many overseas countries, construction management and nursing programs include a requisite number of clinical placements or periods of industrial experience. This chapter reviews the structures, approaches, assessment and evaluation strategies adopted by nursing and construction management for work integrated learning (WIL) placements. The organisation of WIL presents universities with a number of logistical challenges. These include the difficulties inherent in sourcing suitable placement opportunities for large numbers of students while at the same time taking into account the competing demands of students’ paid work commitments. Following a discussion of these issues, this chapter maps the competencies in the two disciplines to illustrate the alignment of professional skills and attributes demonstrated during placement experiences. The aim of this exercise is to show how the attributes can be aligned and documented to enable students to link the theoretical concepts learned at university with real-world practices. This discussion provides a foundation for the next chapter, which addresses how these competencies can be a source of reflection for students and, further, embedded into an on-line system for documentation and assessment purposes.