WIL a surprisingly accurate reflection of 'todays increasingly competitive' world.

'In today's increasingly competitive environment' + 'random statement' can pretty much sum up every Universities marketing campaign. At RMIT the random statement is 'WIL compliant' WIL is an acronym for Work Integrated Learning.
It is one of the many learning 'theories' that I find annoying, apparantly 'kids today' are used to getting information off of 'the internet' and thus they apparantly 'process information' 'differently' which you may have noticed if you've picked up a text book, or even any non-fiction book the annoying layout that breaks the ancient covenant that you read a page left to right, top to bottom for
HOW TO KNOW YOU ARE READING A 'MODERN' TEXT BOOK

1. What you were trying to read just got interupted by a 'pop-up' box placed in the middle of a paragraph.
2. Bullet-pointed vaguely humorous summaries.
3. Sarcastic illustrations of some concept the author is ridiculing.

example, the above (relative to the word 'above' and not to the beggining of this sentence (see above) for which 'below' would have been more appropriate.

But I digress, this is about WIL - WIL pretty much translates to 'the assesment will be predominantly group assignment' and sadly having survived 3 years of pretty much nothing but Group Assignments in Marketing, Economics and Finance appear to have become 'WIL compliant'.

The idea being that group assignments somehow better emulate workplace conditions than individual assignments and thus-thuserson-thusly give us some kind of competitive advantage 'in today's increasingly competetive environment'.

What may surprise you is that I think it does, which is surprising for a modern educational theory/philosophy*.

By 'does' though, I mean it does better emulate the workplace, not necessarily that the world is better off by it.

Allow me to explain:

Most organizations are organized into a cluster of departments, there is usually a department assigned to each significant cluster of responsibilities for some process in the value chain. eg. sales department, marketing department, accounting department, logistics department.

Once you take into account sub-departments, most people work day to day closely with a group of people that will consist usually (in a largish organisation) of 4-8 people +a manager or more likely (and disastorously) 3 or 4.

Now it is unlikely that any course will have a group as large as 8 responsible for an assignment, so 4-5 usually builds parity with an actual workplace. However over the course of a Higher education course, the groups are a lot more fluid, plus you will build up a working knowledge. This is a luxury compared to a workplace, where the spead of change in a department is relatively slow, you are only likely to have 1 person change in a team per year, and its usually the ambitious high-performer.

That said, a vast number of students in higher education choose to work with a group of friends, so it inadvertantly emulates an actual workplace since you tend to make friends (whom you may secretly dispise, whatever) with the people in your department, you feel comfortable with them whilst you distrust outsiders.

Now I'm facing the first formative group assignment periods of my new degree, and overall I'm indifferent to whom I work with. I have enough experience from my marketing degree that working with friends or just a randomly selected group of strangers will yeild statistically the same results. Namely:

A) You will have a star-performer on the team that does 80-90% of the work. They are easy to spot, though may differ in quality.
B) You will have a dead-weight that contributes 0% of the work, or worse by promising to do their 'fair share' and then dissappearing for a surprising array of reasons actually sets you back -10 or -20%.
C) You will have the remainder of people that can competently perform spell checks and turn up to meetings only slightly late and will successfully complete the 10-20% of remainding work, provided you as a group haven't made the rookie mistake of delegating any work to the dead-weight above.

Then you write on your assignment cover sheet that everybody contributed 100%, surprisingly often cutting a break even for the dead-weight team member. (often because the dead weight is also your 'friend' that you repeatedly work with).

Now this is ACTUALLY a PRETTY ACCURATE REFLECTION of how work gets done in a professional environment. The only thing lacking is a clear cut 'manager' the lecturer being more of the distant executive that has a clear idea of the performance they actually want but is too distant from the people doing the work most of the time for them to check compliance in any helpful way. So yeah, the 'manager' who takes ultimate responsibility and if they are a good one, takes the step the team cant on their own and fire any dead weight is lacking from the WIL group assignment facsimile.

But I defy you to work into any organisation or corporate environment and find a non-Pareto (basically, where 80% of the work is done by 20% of the staff, and 20% of the work is done by 80% of the staff) distribution of work-effort. One caveat, you have to look at some objective measure of the work being done, like calls answers, orders processed, project completion rate, sales dollars etc. If you ask anybody how much they contribute you will probably get a percentage that adds up to 900%.

Thus let's call it the 'dead-weight' phenomena that is, how incompetent people can survive in groups for a surprisingly long time where individually they would fail, fail hard and fail quickly is present both in the workplace and now in University thanks to WIL. It isn't quite that bad because most courses still have some kind of individual assesment (like an exam) which doesn't happen in a workplace. Universities have taken a step closer to this dismal reality of today (and to be honest, yesterday's) 'increasingly competitive environment'.

Next, let's look at what I call the 'friend trap' that is workplaces (thanks to the 'innovation' and 'scientification' and 'overemphasis') through networking often recruit people not because they are the most qualified, or have an outstanding track record, or will bring something new and unique to the team, but because they know the person doing the hiring, that person feels comfortable with them and that brings them comfort if no actual help. It also makes them quesy about demanding actual performance from them, because it might hurt the friendship. Forgetting that 'friendship might hurt the business' should be your actual priority (in the eyes of the owners and the law). But don't worry, this isn't the case in most organisations or is only reinforced in hindsight after the business has been thoroughly hurt.
From the perspective of somebody with no bankable skills or particular motivation to be assessed on their own merits, WIL now reflects the 'professional' reality of networking, AKA 'It's not what you know it's who you know'.

Thirdly it shows a diseconomy of scale, namely Group assignments I've always said since my Marketing course days were 'work enough for 5 people done by 1 person.' If you truly 'master' the art of 'group assignments' you can have it done by 2 people, but it usually takes time, and you will still be forced to take on the additional 3 near dead-weights. Similarly as to the 'manager' I alluded to above, WIL accurately reflects the modern day concept of the 'Working-manager' or 'Non-Druckerian-manager' perhaps the biggest insult to actual managers everywhere - also the most prevalent type of manager.
In this sense a manager is simply the person who cares most about the results and trusts his/her colleagues the least to deliver, so they step in and do the lions share of work themselves, being afraid to delegate any responsibilities to anyone. Thus the more people you have to 'manage' or the larger the group, the less productive you become because the more you have to look over the shoulder of those blissfully ignorant people who naively offer to 'help' by doing actual work that you don't trust them to do.
Every worker costs you more time in checking that their work complies to the standard you so deeply care about. It allows 2 people to do the work of 1, in the case of a group of 5 it may be fair to say that it takes '6 people to do the work of 5' but it multiplies out to say that 'enough work for 10 people is done by 1' namely the manager, who has no fucking idea how to delegate and trust people. Because it is their mark on the line (in the case of WIL) and their promotion, mortgage, ego on the line in the case of actual work.
Again WIL accurately reflects and prepares a student for the reality of today's increasingly competitive environment.

The problem I have with programs like WIL, is that the reality may be terrible. I will freely admit that networking is a reality (ie. 90% of job vacancies are filled before they are even advertised) but that doesn't make it a 'good' reality. Pareto may be a reality as regards performance, profitability etc, but again it doesn't make it a good reality.

Universities should be the vanguard of business (and other vocation) thought, not the rearguard trying to catch up to the aggregate standard of workplaces.

Not that the working world isn't a breeding ground for innovation - they do have to actually survive in the marketplace (or go cap in hand to the government threatening job losses for otherwise unemployable people unless they are subsidised/bailed out) but established businesses tend to run on a kind of auto-pilot, where the core competency required is to be conservative and avoid glaring mistakes (Coca-Cola for example doesn't have to come up with new-recipes year on year).

The more a business can run on 'auto-pilot' the more incompetent people they can hide away over time. Perhaps there is no better demonstration of this than the State governments of Australia, after almost 2 decades of continuous reign by Labor in every state, we have a bunch of completely incompetent premiers all teetering on the brink of being ousted (perhaps today for SA and TAS) that emerged out of at least 10 years of 'steady as she goes' policy. In fact I attribute it to Steve Bracks highly successful political formula which was perfected by John So - do as little as you possibly can, and people will thank you for it.

Governments are good analogies for the Businesses University is really preparing us for, because they have a secure income stream (like the Big 4 Banks and the big Car Companies (also taxpayer funded)) are riddled with incompetent well meaning people (who would protest at how overworked and understaffed they are, more readily than do any actual work), and 'star-performing' 'working managers' that invest no time in actual team building or even development of individuals, because they are eternally preoccupied doing the work their team was recruited to do themselves and cleaning up after their team's mistakes because they took no time to bring them up to standard.

In this way WIL is good, the constant torrent of Group Assignments may actually leave graduates dissillusioned before they even graduate (as opposed to 3 years afterwards). My one criticism of WIL is that if it is concerned with reflecting workplace realities, people shouldn't be able to choose their groups at all - only managers can choose their teams and even then it is all too rare for them to bother doing so (they leave it to HR) from a graduate perspective you will be assigned to a team in your first workplace consisting of some stars you thank your own stars for and some people you would never have hired if the choice had been yours. WIL could be improved if they just randomly assigned groups, because this is what your first job will look like.

That said, I wish Universities would just say 'beware Networking, Deadweights and "Working" managers, they are real and they are out there, but we don't want to give degrees to such charlatans.' and then focus on hammering students on their individual merits and competencies, pushing them to be skeptical and speak their mind.

I solemnly swear, if I'm ever in the fiscal position to hire a graduate, my interview will consist of handing them a 'dress code' and a pen and watching to see how much they cross out. That's what I want graduates to do, come in and say 'woah, woah, woah you need to shut the fuck up, take off that necktie its ridiculous. Why do you have everybody working 9-5, they could avoid congestion if you made the hours flexible...' and so fourth.

*The most stupid of which is the theory that giving kids computers (or worse laptops) will somehow make them smarter, rather than dumber, less attentive and more dependant.